The lights came back at 12:06, and by 12:20 the lobby was full of men with flashlights talking about the elevator like it had a fever.
I stayed at the desk, because that is what the desk is for.
The blackout left a four-minute hole in the sensor on floor three, and a hole in the round the guard should have walked.
He came up at six with his badge already in his hand, before I could even ask.
His kid has bad lungs, so he misses shifts, and every shift he misses gets written down somewhere with his name on it.
I put the round in the paper log as walked and initialed it myself. I was on those stairs anyway. Half of it was true.
Eighteen hours is a long time to stand behind glass while the building decides what happened.
My knuckle was wrapped in a grey handkerchief worth more than my coat.
I had not taken the coat off since the blackout. That lobby is cold at four in the morning.
The elevator was still dead, so at eight he came through the lobby on foot like the rest of us.
No tie. Clean shaven. The watch catching the light every time his wrist moved.
He did not slow down until he was standing at my counter.
Coren: Three's sensor was dark for four minutes last night.
Coren: Who walked that floor?
Talia: I did.
Coren: You were on the stairs. The sensor doesn't know that.
Talia: The sensor isn't the one getting written up.
Coren: Don't feed me shit, Talia. A man didn't walk a floor and you signed that he did.
Talia: He was up there with me for part of it. Near enough.
Coren: Near enough isn't a defense. It's a habit.
Coren: Who are you protecting?
Talia: A man with a kid and a bad chest. He gets docked, he doesn't eat.
Coren: Then he had better be worth your badge.
Coren: Because someone answers for those four minutes, and it isn't going to be him.
Then he stopped talking and looked at me.
Not at the log. Not at the pad. At the handkerchief still knotted around my hand, because I had not bothered to fix it.
Being looked at by him was like being weighed. It took four seconds and I felt every one.
Coren: Fourteen flights up a dark stairwell, and you gave the credit away before nine.
Talia: Is there a question in there?
Coren: No.
He walked to the stairs with his phone already at his ear, and the lobby went back to pretending he had never been in it.
I stood there trying to work out whether I had just been warned or promoted.
My hands were shaking, which was stupid, because I had been colder all week.
At one I clocked out for thirty minutes and got on the 14 bus to Linden House.
The care bill is due on the sixth of every month. It was the sixth.
The card machine beeped twice, took it, and I said fuck under my breath anyway.
They had her in the sun room with her shoes off and her hands folded over the gold ring she never stops turning.
I did not wake her. I put her shoes back on and left the receipt on the desk where the good pens are kept.
She looked fine. She always looks fine in here. That is what I am paying for.
I was back at the desk at 1:36 with a vending machine sandwich I never opened.
Nobody asked where I had been. That is the whole trick of being good at this job.
You make yourself easy to walk past.
Downstairs they call it the top floor. I call it my office, because I paid for all of it.
I read the blackout report twice. Fourteen pages, and twelve of them were about the elevator.
Page thirteen had the same name on it four times.
She signed a round she did not walk, for a man who could not walk it himself.
People lie in logs to save their own necks. She did it twice in one shift to save someone else's.
Her badge said out at 1:14 and back at 1:36. Twenty two minutes. Not lunch.
The board wants her gone by the end of the quarter. Their list came up on Monday and her name sat in the middle, where they put the ones they think will not fight.
I opened the blackout footage instead of the merger file.
Four minutes on three. Four months until the quarter closes.
I do not like things I cannot account for.
Four minutes missing on three. Twenty two minutes off her desk. A woman who gave both away for nothing.
I picked up the phone to call her upstairs, then put it back down. Better if she does not know I am looking yet.