A housekeeper who wept in the lobby would be called emotional, unprofessional, unstable — the very words the powerful always reach for to turn a person’s pain into evidence of their unreliability.

So she had trained herself, over years, to carry her feeling behind a still face and let it out only in private, on the bus, at home, in the dark where no manager could use it.

It was a discipline forced on her by exactly the kind of people standing behind that desk, and it was, Wescott thought, a quiet tragedy dressed up as composure.

She should never have had to learn it.

A person’s grief and a person’s exhaustion should be safe to show at their workplace among decent colleagues.

That Bea had spent twelve years believing otherwise, and had been right to, was its own small indictment of everything he was about to tear down.