People like Espe are all around every workplace, doing the unglamorous work that keeps a place running, and they are, precisely because of that work, the easiest people to suspect and the least likely to be defended — because the assumption runs quietly underneath everything that a person who cleans floors is a person of small consequence, whose word carries less weight than a manager’s, whose dignity is somehow more disposable.

Corwin had acted on that assumption without ever naming it to himself.

He would never have hauled a senior manager into the middle of the floor and demanded they empty their bag in front of the staff.

He had done it to Espe because some part of him had filed her, without thinking, under the kind of person you can do that to. And what she gave him, standing there with her chin level and her thirty-two years behind her, was the quiet correction of a woman who knew her own worth even if he had forgotten it: I have never once taken a thing that wasn’t mine. It was not a defense.

It was a statement of fact from a person who had earned the right to be believed and been denied it anyway, and it hung in that storage room long after she had gone.

Chapter 11 — The Records