EDMUND’S POV
I knew something was wrong before I reached my office.
Not from anything specific. Nothing I could have pointed to and said: there, that is the signal. It was more atmospheric than that, the specific quality of wrongness that arrives before the evidence does, in the way a room feels different before you’ve identified what has changed. I had learned, across twenty years of building and running a business, to trust that particular sensation. It had rarely been wrong.
This morning it was in the elevator.
Marcus, my building concierge, had greeted me in the lobby with his usual efficiency, but the greeting had been a fraction shorter than customary, not rudely, not in any way that could be named, just slightly compressed, the greeting of a man who was being professionally cor
