Part Four: The Canceled Meetings
He called Marguerite.
When she appeared in the doorway — eight-oh-three, he noted, slightly early, presumably because she had seen the light on in his office and something unusual in the energy of the floor — she stopped at the sight of Lina, who had put the spray bottle on the desk and was now examining the various objects on its surface with the focused curiosity of a child encountering a new environment.
“Marguerite,” Alexandre said. “Cancel my morning.”
Marguerite, who had worked for him for four years and had never heard those words in that sequence, took a moment.
“All of it?”
“Until noon. Reschedule where possible. Explain that something urgent came up.” He paused. “Please find out if we have any food in the building. Something appropriate for a child.”
Marguerite looked at Lina. Lina looked at Marguerite.
“Hello,” Lina said.
“Hello,” Marguerite said. She looked at Alexandre with an expression he could not fully read.
“And—” He found the hospital number for the arrondissement Lina had named. “Can you find out what happened with an admission this morning? Sofia Martins. I’ll give you the address.”
Marguerite took the address, took the morning meetings, and left with an expression she did not entirely manage to conceal.
Lina watched her go. Then she looked at Alexandre.
“You canceled your meetings,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Because of me?”
“Yes.”
She appeared to be uncertain what to make of this. She picked up the spray bottle again, turning it in her hands.
“I could clean while you work,” she offered. “I don’t want to make your day wrong.”
Something moved in his chest that he did not examine in the moment.
“You’re not making anything wrong,” he said. “Are you hungry?”
She was, it turned out, very hungry. She had not eaten breakfast — she had been managing the ambulance and the bus and the coins and the security guard, and breakfast had not fit into the timeline. She ate the croissant that Marguerite produced with the focused efficiency of a child who had been running on adrenaline and urgency and was only now discovering that bodies required fuel.
He watched her eat.
He could not have said what he was feeling. It was not a feeling he had a ready category for — something about the sequence of events she had described, the coin purse for school lunches, the ambulance call from a five-year-old, the waiting for the sound of the door, the uniform that was too big held together with a knot. Something about the fact that she had sat across from him and explained herself with more clarity and composure than many adults who had sat in that same chair.
Something about the simple, irrefutable logic of it: someone had to come to work.
