Northlight’s confirmatory diligence included what the letter called a management session with the Chief Executive Officer, to be attended by the Purchaser’s principal. Daniel scheduled it for the fifteenth of October at four in the afternoon, in the glass room on the fifth floor at Halo. He told Abby the principal would come alone and asked that she do the same.

He didn’t tell her who it was.

“She’ll know,” Daniel said to Lea on the phone, the night before. “The second you walk in. You know she’ll know.”

“She’ll know when I walk in,” Lea agreed. “Not before.”

“Why does that matter?”

Lea was at Sofia’s desk, under the pink lamp, with the index open in front of her. She’d added a fifth column to it in the last week. It had no heading.

“Because she’s spent a year knowing everything about me before I walked into a room,” she said. “I’d like her to have the four seconds I had.”

She wore the navy dress. She didn’t know what else to wear; it was the dress she’d done everything in now. Under it, nothing, the way it had been in the other glass room. The rings at zero, loose and light on her breasts, which still felt strange, six days on — she kept putting her hand to her chest at odd moments as if to check something had been left behind. The flange, cool at the top of her, against the triangle. The bands. The stubs.

Teresa signed her in again. L. CALLOWAY — VISITOR — ESCORT REQUIRED. This time Teresa didn’t say anything at all. She just walked her to the elevator, and pressed five, and on the way up, at four, Lea felt the car pass her old floor and the north light in the corner office and didn’t look.

The glass room was empty when she got there. Blinds down. The long table. The chair at the far end, by the window, where Pauline had sat in green with a small black envelope and said I’d rather not touch her.

Lea didn’t sit there. She sat at the foot of the table, where she’d taken the minutes for ten months. Then she thought about it, and got up, and sat at the head.

She put her hands flat on the table and waited.

Abby came in at 4:01.

She came in fast, the way she came into every meeting, already talking — “Daniel, if this is another one of your—” — with a folder under her arm and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, in a grey suit Lea had seen her wear a hundred times, and she was three steps into the room before she saw who was at the head of the table.

She stopped.

Lea watched it happen. She’d wanted to; she’d told Daniel so. And now she watched it, and it wasn’t what she’d thought it would be.

Abby didn’t go white. She didn’t drop the folder. Her face didn’t close like a door, the way it had in January when she’d said Forget I said that. She stood three steps inside the glass room with her hand still on the edge of the door, and looked at Lea, and Lea watched her understand it. All of it, in order, in about four seconds. The letter. Northlight. The north light in the corner office on four. Condition One. The signature on the U-1 request, L. Calloway, in a perfect hand. The board resolution she’d seconded to keep herself out of a room one floor down. Daniel’s eleven seconds of silence on the phone. Did you ever once think about asking her how she was?

Lea watched Abby read the whole file in four seconds, the way Lea had once accepted forty-one pages.

Then Abby let go of the door. It swung shut behind her, softly, on its closer.

“Hello, Lea,” she said.

“Hello, Abby.”

Abby didn’t sit down. She stood just inside the door with the folder under her arm, and looked at Lea at the head of her own table, and Lea let her look.

“Northlight,” said Abby.

“Yes.”

“After the office.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t get it. I read it forty times and I didn’t get it.” Abby’s voice was perfectly level. “I thought it was Daniel being poetic.”

“Daniel isn’t poetic.”

“No.” Abby took her glasses out of her hair. She folded them. She put them in the breast pocket of the grey suit, with great care, the way she’d once taken them off in the kitchen on the second night to tell Lea about the reports. “Condition One,” she said. “Me. You’re keeping me.”

“I’m keeping you as chief executive of Halo Biometric,” said Lea. “That’s what Condition One says.”

Abby looked at her for a long time.

“Sit down, Abby,” said Lea.

It came out of her mouth before she’d decided to say it. She heard it come out — the shape of it, the flatness, the exact cadence of a sentence she’d heard a thousand times from the other end — and for a second she couldn’t breathe, because she didn’t know whose voice it was.

Abby heard it too. Something moved in her face. Then she pulled out the chair at Lea’s right hand — the chair Lea had sat in, every morning, for the 8:15 — and sat down in it.

Lea did the first part as a lawyer. She’d decided that on the train. It was the only way she knew how to do it at all.

She slid three pages across the table. Not the bid. A side letter. She’d drafted it herself, at Sofia’s desk, and Nadia had read it twice and said Are you sure, and Lea had said yes, and Nadia had said Then it’s very good.

Side Letter — Northlight Holdings LLC / A. Maddox

1. Schedule A. The agreement dated November 13 between the Company and L. Calloway, styled “Schedule A,” is terminated as of the date of this letter, and the parties acknowledge that it was void from inception.
2. Records. All participant notes, audio recordings, transcripts and derived materials relating to program L-01 held by A. Maddox personally, on any device, shall be delivered to Purchaser’s counsel at Closing and not retained in any form.
3. Keys. At Closing, A. Maddox shall deliver to the Purchaser all physical and electronic keys, tools and credentials associated with program L-01, including without limitation the platform release tool.
4. In consideration of the foregoing, the Purchaser will not require A. Maddox’s removal as Chief Executive Officer, and L. Calloway will release all claims against A. Maddox personally arising from Schedule A.

Abby read it.

She read it the way she read everything, fast and then again slowly. Lea watched her reach paragraph three and stop. Including without limitation the platform release tool. The small case in the glass cabinet in the back room, behind the white door with the thumb pad. The magnetic tool. The only thing in the world that could collapse the forty-millimetre ring at the top of Lea’s body and take it out.

Abby put the pages down.

“All of them,” she said.

“All of them.”

“The tool.”

“Exhibit C, line thirty-one,” said Lea. “Including all associated keys. You let Pauline write that line about me in June. I’m the one buying it.”

Abby looked at the side letter. Then, slowly, she looked up, past it, at Lea.

“And then what?”

Lea said nothing.

“You buy the keys,” said Abby. “All of them. The tool. My notes. And then what? You take the tool to Priti and have it all out and walk away, and I keep my company, and I never—” She stopped. Her jaw moved. “That’s the deal. That’s what this is. You’re buying yourself back from me.”

Lea held her eyes.

She didn’t answer. She’d known Abby would ask; she’d known, on the train, that it would be the only question that mattered, and she’d decided she wouldn’t answer it. Not here. Not with the side letter on the table between them and Daniel’s fund’s money behind it and Abby looking at her like that.

She let Abby think it.

She let Abby believe, for as long as it took, that she was gone.

It was the cruelest thing she had ever done. She knew it while she did it. She did it anyway, at the head of the long table, with her hands flat on the wood and the flange cool at the top of her and the rings at zero, and watched Abby believe it.

Approximately sixty percent true, she thought. She can’t find the other forty.

She understood, then, a little, what it had felt like from the other end.

It was 4:40 when she needed to pee.

It came up the way it always did now — a small pressure, low, and then, against the flange, the cool, precise knowledge that nothing would happen. She’d had a coffee on the train. She’d had a glass of water when she sat down. She’d known it would come, and she’d known roughly when, and she’d decided not to do anything about it before the meeting.

She took the cheap pharmacy phone out of the pocket of the navy dress and put it on the table between them.

Abby looked at the phone. She’d never seen it. It wasn’t hers.

Lea opened the app. One app. Request release. The free-text box.

Need the restroom. Please.

She sent it, and set the phone face-up on the table, and folded her hands, and went on with paragraph two of the side letter as if nothing had happened.

Abby wasn’t listening to paragraph two. Abby was looking at the screen.

Request pending.

“Who,” said Abby.

“Northlight.”

“Who at Northlight.”

“I don’t know,” said Lea. “I drafted it so I wouldn’t.”

Abby sat in Lea’s old chair and looked at the word pending on a cheap phone she’d never seen, and Lea watched her understand what it was. U-1. The thing she’d designed in February and put in a supplement under Lea’s signature because she’d wanted it waiting. The thing she’d imagined fitting. The asking she’d imagined. The asking she’d imagined being the one to answer.

Lea was asking, at her table, in front of her. Asking someone else.

Six minutes. Lea went on talking. She talked about delivery mechanics, and counsel, and escrow, and the pressure grew low in her belly and pushed against the flange until she had to shift in the chair, and Abby watched her shift, and didn’t say anything.

Nine minutes.

Lea’s voice was steady. Her thighs weren’t. She pressed her knees together under the table, and then remembered she couldn’t, not really, not with the stubs, and opened them again.

“Lea,” said Abby, very quietly.

“Paragraph four,” said Lea.

Twelve minutes.

Request approved.

Window: 5 minutes.
Approved by: Northlight Holdings LLC (administrator).

“Excuse me,” said Lea, and stood up, and went out of the glass room and down the corridor to the restroom on five, and closed the door of the end stall, and leaned her forehead against it.

When she came back, three minutes and forty seconds later, Abby was standing at the window. She’d raised the blinds. She was standing with her hand flat on the glass, looking out at the river, the way she’d stood in April when Pauline had come into the building for the first time.

She didn’t turn round.

“I designed that,” she said, to the window. “In February. I thought about it every night for a month. What you’d sound like. Asking.”

“I know,” said Lea. “I read the note.”

She’d planned to leave then. Nadia had told her to. Put the letter on the table, let her read it, and get out. Don’t let her near you.

She didn’t leave.

She stood at the head of the long table and looked at Abby’s back at the window, and Abby’s hand on the glass, and she felt it come up in her the way it had in the other glass room. The pull. Low in her belly and in the backs of her knees. Toward the floor. Toward this woman. Toward good, and come here, and someone else’s hand taking all of it away from her.

She’d stood up against it in front of a table full of money. She couldn’t stand up against it in front of Abby. She’d known she wouldn’t be able to. She’d come anyway.

“Abby,” she said.

Abby turned round.

And Lea watched her see it — watched her see Lea’s face, and know it, the way she knew every one of Lea’s numbers. Abby had spent a year reading that face off a graph. She read it now, live, at four metres, with no line, and her own face changed.

“I don’t have anything,” said Abby. Her voice was very low. “No line. No app. I can’t see you. I can’t touch any of it.” A pause. “I can’t make you do anything.”

“I know.”

“Then what—”

“You have your hands,” said Lea.

Abby didn’t move for a long moment.

Then she crossed the glass room. She came round the long table and stopped in front of Lea, close, closer than she’d stood in seven weeks, and Lea could smell her — the same soap, the same faint dry cedar of the grey suit — and her knees nearly went.

“May I?” said Abby.

Lea stared at her.

Abby had never once asked. Not in a year. Not on the terrace, not on the rug, not on the table. She’d offered the door, every time, scrupulously; she’d never asked permission to come through it.

“Yes,” said Lea.

Abby put her hands on Lea’s wrists. Not cuffs. Just her hands, one round each wrist, firm, and drew them behind Lea’s back and held them there in one hand, the way she’d done in the hall a hundred times, and Lea’s whole body sagged into it with a sound she’d never made in front of anyone.

Then Abby reached round with her other hand and drew the zip down.

She did it on the long table. Of course she did. She laid Lea back on the pale wood where Lea had taken the minutes for ten months, with the navy dress open and pushed off her shoulders and the blinds up and the river behind them, and held both of Lea’s wrists above her head in one hand against the wood, and put her other hand between Lea’s thighs.

She didn’t hurry. She’d never hurried. Two fingers, flat, over the triangle; she found it as if she’d never stopped touching it, because she knew exactly where it was. She’d put it there. She found the flange below it, and paused on it, one fingertip, cool metal, and Lea felt her pause — felt her learn it — and then she went on, down, and pushed two fingers into Lea’s cunt, slow, all the way, and curled them to the front wall, and pressed.

Lea arched off the table.

“No line,” said Abby, very softly, close above her. “I can’t see your numbers. I don’t know your heart rate. I don’t know where you are.” Her fingers moved. “I have to do this the way people do it. By looking.”

She looked. She leaned over Lea on the long table with her fingers inside her and her other hand pinning Lea’s wrists, and looked into her face, and worked her, slowly, watching every flicker, the way she’d once watched a line climb. And Lea climbed. God, she climbed. Seven weeks without anyone’s hand. Without Abby’s. She climbed so fast it frightened her, and Abby saw it, and slowed, and held her right below the top, by eye, by nothing but looking, and Lea sobbed.

“Why,” said Abby.

Lea’s eyes came open.

“Why are you doing this.” Abby’s fingers didn’t stop. “The bid. The fitting. Asking someone else in front of me. Why.”

“Because—” The climb, rising. “Because I’m the asset—”

“That’s not why.”

“Because she’d have taken it — Pauline — she’d have taken all of it, and you, and—”

“That’s not why either.”

The edge. She was at it. Right at it. Abby’s fingers on the front wall and her thumb on the triangle and her eyes on Lea’s face and Lea’s whole body straining up off the pale wood toward it, toward the top, toward — and Abby didn’t stop. Abby didn’t have to stop. Abby didn’t have anything that could stop her. She just kept going, kept looking, and Lea went up and up and—

The twinge.

Cold, bright, deep, from the top of her. Her pelvic floor slammed out of rhythm around Abby’s fingers. The white flash at her clit. The climb, gone.

Lea cried out on the long table, loud, with the blinds up.

Abby’s hand went still.

She stayed like that, bent over Lea, two fingers inside her and her hand still pinning Lea’s wrists, and Lea watched her face as she understood it. Not a line. Not an app. Not Pauline’s floor; that was gone. Not Abby’s settings; those were gone too, wiped, factory configuration restored. Nobody had stopped Lea. Nobody could have.

“You turned it back on,” said Abby.

Her voice was very strange.

“Yes,” said Lea.

“Yourself.”

“Yes.”

“When.”

“On the table. When they gave it back to me. I had it for ninety-one seconds.” Lea lay on the long wood with her chest heaving. “Nothing was stopping me. I could have come in front of all of them. Pauline was sitting at my feet. I could have.” She looked up into Abby’s face. “I turned it back on. And then I gave it away.”

Abby didn’t say anything at all.

She took her fingers out of Lea, slowly. She let go of Lea’s wrists. She straightened up, and stood beside the long table in her grey suit, and looked down at Lea lying naked on it with the navy dress round her waist, and Lea saw her face do something she had never once seen it do in a year, on the rug or the table or the stage.

It broke. Just for a second. Then Abby put it back.

“Why,” she said again. Almost inaudible.

Lea sat up. She pulled the dress up over her shoulders. She reached behind her for the zip, arms bent up, the way she did it now.

Abby’s hands came up, as if to do it for her. They stopped in the air.

Lea did it herself. Two tries.

“Read the side letter, Abby,” she said. “Sign it or don’t. Closing’s on the thirteenth of November.”

She picked up the cheap phone and put it in her pocket. She went to the door.

“The thirteenth,” said Abby, behind her.

Lea stopped with her hand on the door.

“You picked that.”

“Yes.”

“That’s the day you signed it. Last year. Schedule A. On the rug.”

“I know,” said Lea, and went out.

HALO BIOMETRIC — PARTICIPANT NOTES (PRIVATE)

Subject: L-01.
Day: 215.

I’m not sure these are participant notes anymore. I don’t have a participant. I have a counterparty.

16:01. Glass room. Northlight’s principal was sitting at the head of my table.

It took me about four seconds. I think she timed it.

Side letter: Schedule A void. My notes delivered and not retained. All keys, including the tool. In exchange, I keep the company and she releases me.

She’s buying herself out. She didn’t say so. I asked her what happens after, and she didn’t answer, and she watched me while she didn’t. She knew exactly what not answering would do. I taught her that. Approximately sixty percent.

16:40. She asked to use the restroom. Not me. Twelve minutes pending. I watched her thighs.

I asked if I could touch her. I have never asked her that. She said yes.

No line. I had to do it by looking at her face. I’d forgotten that was possible. I don’t think I ever knew.

At the edge, her platform stopped her. Interruption: on. Not my setting; my settings are gone. She set it herself, on the table, on the eighth, with nothing stopping her. Ninety-one seconds. Then she gave it to Northlight.

I wrote it on day twenty-three: the exit is the instrument. Never remove it. Make it cost more.

She’s holding the door open herself now. And she’s charging me for it.

Closing: 13 November.

I’m going to sign it. I’d sign anything she put in front of me. I think she knows that too.