It happened on Friday morning.
I was in the east corridor at half past nine, the linen cart in front of me, the weekly restock in its second hour. The east corridor connected to the main entrance hall through a right angle turn that created, at the corner, a specific blind spot, a few feet of corridor that were not visible from either the main hall or the east wing unless you were standing in the turn itself.
I was standing in the turn itself.
Not deliberately. I had been standing there for four minutes replacing the runner that had shifted again, the same runner, the same shift, the specific slow migration of a carpet on a smooth floor that no amount of repositioning had fully corrected and that I had been correcting weekly for three years. I was crouched at the corner of it with my ha
