Charles watched him leave, then turned a page.

“When’s your birthday, Miss Reyes?”

“Next month.

On the twelfth.”

“The twelfth,” he said, and wrote nothing down at all, and shut the notebook.

I went back to my desk with my ears still burning and worked through the afternoon on a pile of two-year-old claims.

At two thirty Derek’s door stood open.

He waved me in with two fingers and pointed to the chair across from his desk, and he kept typing until I sat down.