PART 7:

Ethan stayed in his chair. Stay. Prescott came over about 20 minutes later. He sat down in the chair Okafor had vacated and put his elbows on his knees and looked at the floor for a moment before looking at Ethan. How’s your arm? Fine. The security camera in the northeast corner got the whole thing.

I already had our AV guy pull the footage. Prescott paused. It’s He stopped. I don’t know how to describe it, actually. It’s fast. The whole thing is very fast. It usually is. Does it always feel like that? When it’s happening? Ethan thought about it. Feels slower than it looks. You’re tracking a lot of information very quickly.

Time doesn’t compress the way people say. It’s more like you’re moving at the speed you need to move and everything else is trying to catch up. Prescott absorbed this. He looked like a man rethinking a number of assumptions. I should have pushed harder on Callaway, he said. You flagged it. That was your job. I should have pushed harder. Ethan didn’t argue with him because he was right and they both knew it and there wasn’t much utility in being diplomatic about it.

You know for next time, he said. Prescott nodded. He was quiet for a moment, then he said, Sophia Blackwell asked about you. Ethan looked at him. Before the police arrived. She came over to me and asked who you were, what your name was, what your role was. He paused. I told her you were our maintenance tech.

She I think she was having a hard time fitting that together with what she’d just watched. Most people would. She wants to talk to you. The tiredness that moved through Ethan then wasn’t irritation, exactly. It was the feeling of knowing that a conversation was coming that he didn’t particularly want to have, and that avoiding it would be either impossible or more trouble than it was worth.

“Tell her I’m not going anywhere for a while.” he said. Sofia Blackwell did not come over immediately. He noticed that. She was occupied for the better part of the next 40 minutes, speaking with the police, with her own security team, with her assistant, who appeared to be managing an escalating series of communications from somewhere outside the building.

She handled it all with a focused efficiency that Ethan observed in passing and found, despite himself, genuinely impressive. A significant disruption had just landed in the middle of a high-stakes event, and she was dealing with it the way an experienced professional deals with disruption. One item at a time, no wasted energy, no visible panic.

He was starting to understand that there was more to her than the 4-second impression she’d made in the corridor that morning. Not that his original read had been wrong, exactly. She had been exactly what she appeared to be in that moment. Someone who made rapid, confident judgments and didn’t question them.

The question was how she handled it when the judgments turned out to be wrong. That was the more interesting data. She came over at 3:47. She didn’t bring anyone with her, which Ethan noted. She crossed the ballroom floor alone. Her assistant made a small move to follow, and she stopped him with a look. And she sat down in the chair across from Ethan without asking whether she could, and without any of the social scaffolding that people usually constructed before a difficult conversation.

He gave her credit for that. She looked at him directly. She had, he noticed for the first time, green eyes. Not the kind of green that seems designed for impact, but a quieter, murkier shade. The kind that belonged to a person who spent more time observing than being observed. “I don’t know how to start this conversation.” she said.

“Then start in the middle.” Something moved across her face, not quite a smile. The acknowledgement of a smile. “I was rude to you this morning,” she said, “in front of people. I questioned your presence in a place you had every right to be, and I implied” She stopped. “I implied that you were less competent or less relevant than you were.

Than you are.” Ethan let that sit for a moment. “You were managing a security concern,” he said. “The way you read it was wrong, but the instinct to flag it wasn’t wrong. Don’t do that.” “Do what?” “Find reasons to make my behavior more reasonable than it was. You don’t have to do that.” She held his gaze steadily.

“I was condescending. I did it publicly. And then the person I condescended to in front of an audience turned out to be the only person in this building who” She stopped again, and this time the stop was different, harder, like something had snagged on something internal that she wasn’t expecting. She looked away for a moment.

At the stage. At the knife, which was now marked with evidence tape on the marble floor 40 ft away. “I couldn’t move,” she said more quietly. “When I saw it, the knife, I’m I’m someone who prides herself on functioning under pressure, and I froze completely. For two or three seconds, I just completely froze.” Ethan didn’t say anything.

“And you moved toward it,” she said. “I was closer to it.” “That’s not why you moved toward it.” He didn’t argue with that, either. She turned back to him. “Marcus told me he tackled you during the takedown. He made a decision based on what he saw. What he saw looked like I was part of the problem. He was wrong.

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