Kellerman had come off that elevator wearing the face of a manager irritated at being pulled from something important to deal with a nuisance at the desk — the face of a man accustomed to treating guest problems as beneath him and staff problems as noise.

And then he had seen his employer and reassembled himself, in the space of a breath, into a portrait of deference and concern.

The speed of the transformation was the tell.

A leader whose respect was genuine would not need to switch it on; it would already be running, the same in front of the owner as in front of a tired stranger at midnight.

Kellerman had two faces, and he wore whichever one the audience required, and the fact that he owned two faces at all meant that the gracious one was a performance and the contemptuous one was the truth.

Wescott had built the habit of arriving unannounced precisely to catch that gap — the distance between how a place behaved when it thought the owner was watching and how it behaved when it thought he wasn’t.