She asked about the junction box.” Wayne slipped the complaint into a folder.

“Carry your things out the back at six.

There’s a camera in the lobby, and I’d just as soon nobody got a picture of it.”

At two in the afternoon her kitchen was the quietest spot she knew, and she had never once been grateful for that before.

Her ten-year service pin lay on the table beside the salt shaker.

Brass, about the size of a dime, the back bent from when she’d dropped it in a parking lot in her fourth year.