The meeting invitation disappeared while Nina was accepting it.
She thought she'd clicked the wrong place. Then her inbox closed, leaving a sign-in window. She entered her password and watched it return a message telling her to contact her administrator.
Across the aisle someone laughed at a joke she hadn't heard. Nina tried once more.
The security man reached her desk before she could pick up the phone. He was holding his own phone with the screen tilted toward him.
“Nina? Could we have a minute downstairs?”
“What's happened?”
“Take your personal things.”
She looked up. He'd kept his voice low, and now everyone close enough to hear was trying to look somewhere else.
“I have a meeting.”
“It's been changed.”
She stood. Her coat was on the chair; the bag strap had caught beneath one leg. She pulled, and it didn't come. The security man bent to free it. Nina said too sharply that she'd got it, then had to lift the chair herself.
At the elevator he asked for her badge.
“Are you serious?”
“They've suspended access pending review. I'm just supposed to—”
“I know what you're supposed to do.”
He looked at her. She had seen him take a wet umbrella from an elderly visitor that morning so she wouldn't have to fold it herself. Now he was looking at Nina with the wary patience he probably used for drunks at the front desk.
She gave him the badge.
Downstairs a woman from employee relations was waiting in a room off reception. The security man left them together. The woman offered Nina water, which made Nina want to knock the empty glasses off the table.
“This is a temporary suspension of company access,” she began.
“Because I asked for the client's action record?”
“I can't discuss a finding. There isn't a finding.”
“Then why am I out of the building?”
“You were instructed to wait before proceeding. There are concerns about unassigned case access and external contact.”
Nina put her bag on the table. “It was my decision. My name on it. I called a number we'd already verified, in the same case.”
“I understand that's your account.”
Nina laughed. The woman flinched almost imperceptibly, and Nina stopped. It was a phrase she'd used herself. A way to keep listening without agreeing. There was no reason for it to hurt like an insult.
The woman gave her a printed contact number and told her where the written notice would be sent. Nina asked about her work phone. She was told not to access company material or contact clients while the review was open; arrangements for company property would follow. Nobody searched her bag. Nobody needed to. The systems had already closed.
“I have work waiting,” Nina said. “People waiting.”
“The team will reassign it.”
“Who?”
“I don't have that information.”
“There are notes in the drafts. They won't see them if they just move the case.”
The woman turned the printed notice back toward herself and wrote something at the bottom.
“I can pass on that there are unfinished notes.”
“Pass on where they are. They need the notes, not a warning that I didn't finish.”
The woman looked up. “Tell me where.”
Nina gave the location without asking to sign in herself. The woman read it back. It was the first thing in the room that had felt like a task with an end.
“And my things?”
“Your personal things can be collected by arrangement.”
“I've got them.”
“Then you're ready.”
Nina looked at the bag on the table. She'd been imagining books and a mug, the cardigan she left on the back of her chair. They were still upstairs. She could make this woman write another note about them. Or she could pick up the bag she had brought and go.
She picked it up.
In reception a colleague was bending over a box of leftover lunch supplies. He looked at Nina, then at the employee-relations woman beside her.
“You missed the photograph,” he said.
“I was busy.”
He smiled automatically. Nina saw him realize something was wrong and try to let the smile go without making that visible too.
“There's food left if—”
“No.”
He lifted a paper bag from the box anyway. “They were throwing it out.”
“I don't want it.”
The woman beside Nina moved slightly, making a path toward the door. Nina could walk through it. She could get out before anyone else offered her strawberries or asked about a review she wasn't going to be at.
Her colleague put the bag back. “All right. See you.”
“Could you tell Ethan to check the drafts?”
He glanced at the woman. Nina heard what she'd done: passed the task round her before the ink was dry on her note.
“She's already sending it,” she said. “Sorry. Don't. Just leave it.”
He nodded. The nod would be the thing he remembered when someone asked what she'd said before she left.
The security man opened the street door for her. Nina thanked him without looking up, then made herself look at him. He hadn't become anyone else since he'd helped with her bag. She stepped outside.
Owen Pike was standing near the curb.
She recognized him without remembering from where: a man whose face belonged to corridors and deliveries, to work carried out before she arrived. He raised a hand.
“Nina? Need a ride?”
“Who are you?”
“Owen. I do some work with Adam.”
She looked at the car behind him. The passenger seat was empty, the window down.
“He sent you?”
“No. Saw you coming out. Everything all right?”
People were leaving after the lunch, carrying folded certificates and paper bags. One of the client women waved. Nina lifted a hand in reply.
“I'm fine.”
“You look a bit—”
“My car's here.”
Owen glanced toward the garage, then back at her. “Of course.”
She went past him. She could hear her own shoes, too fast on the sidewalk. At the garage she looked back. He was talking on his phone, not following her.
Inside her car she locked the doors before putting on her seat belt.
Vivian called.
“Where are you?”
“Outside.”
“I'm sorry. I asked them to give me time to handle it.”
“Then handle it.”
“I need you to stop contacting people while we straighten this out.”
“What about the client action?”
“Nina. Your job.”
She looked at the garage wall. Somebody had scratched a set of initials into the paint beside the space number. She'd parked here hundreds of times and never noticed them.
“Yes,” she said. “My job.”
She ended the call.
For a moment she didn't know where to go. Home meant Adam, who would have received the officer's call by now. It meant an explanation she would have to offer before she had an answer worth saying out loud.
She opened Waymark Money to move enough into her other account for a room, fuel, a few days in which she didn't have to ask either of them for anything. The app had signed her out. When she tried to return, it said recovery was required.
She followed the recovery process until it asked her to photograph her identification. The document lay in her palm, the same one the officer had handed back without hesitation. She held it against the dark seat, took the picture and waited.
The result arrived almost immediately. Unable to complete. Contact support.
By the time a person answered, Nina had driven out of the garage and parked on a side street. She gave her name, the account details and the reference the app displayed. The support worker asked to take her through the information again.
“I've just done that.”
“I understand. I need to do it with you.”
Nina answered. Current address. Previous address. The amount of a recent transfer. The worker put her on hold.
A person pushing a stroller passed the car. Nina turned her head so they wouldn't see her sitting alone with tears in her eyes before anything had actually been lost.
The worker returned. There was a conflicting-profile claim. The recovery couldn't be completed through this channel. Online transfers were temporarily restricted during their fraud review.
“Who made the claim?” Nina asked.
“I can't provide that.”
“What information are you comparing?”
“The review is ongoing.”
“I know how the review works. I work at Threadline.”
The words came out before she could stop them. There was a silence on the line, then the worker said she would note the information.
Nina closed her eyes.
She asked for the route that involved a person looking at her and her document. The worker gave her instructions for an in-person review and said the restriction notice would explain the available contacts. She made no promise about how quickly anything would be fixed.
“So I can't move my money tonight.”
“Not through the online transfer service while this restriction is in place.”
Nina wrote the reference on the back of the hospital parking ticket. She thanked the woman because the woman had stayed while she asked the same question three ways.
Then she got out her wallet.
Her unrelated credit-union card was behind a grocery loyalty card and an expired museum pass. She drove to an ATM she used on her way home, put it in and entered her PIN.
For a few seconds she was frightened to look at the screen.
It asked what she wanted. She withdrew cash. The machine counted, stopped, counted again. When the notes emerged she gripped them too tightly and nearly tore the paper band on her wallet trying to put them away.
Across the street, a child was refusing to get into a parked car. His mother stood beside him, waiting. Nina put the cash inside her wallet and waited until her breathing slowed before she returned to the car.
She took out her phone and found Iris's number.
Her thumb hovered over it. Their last exchange was a photograph of their father beside his disputed hedge. Nina had replied with a practical suggestion. Iris had replied with a thumbs-up that Nina knew wasn't gratitude.
She pressed call.