And then she stopped.

Her hand stopped about an inch above the cover, and I watched a woman’s face go from a professional smile to no expression at all in roughly a second, and she took the hand back.

“One moment, please,” she said.

Not unkindly.

Quietly.

And she did not touch it.

She left it on the counter in front of me and walked — not fast, but without stopping to put anything away — to the glass-fronted office at the back of the lobby.

Through the glass I watched her say something to a grey-haired man at a desk, and point back toward my window with a hand that did not look like the hand that had been typing forty seconds earlier.