Across the lobby.
Jenny had found the sofa.
It was a good sofa — the kind placed in corporate lobbies to signal that the company valued the comfort of visitors while ensuring those visitors waited long enough to feel the importance of whoever they were waiting to see.
Jenny sat in it.
Her bag on her lap.
She breathed.
Her eyes moved around the lobby. The people passing through. The security barriers. The camera position above the reception desk — one blind spot to the right, which she filed. The lift bank to the left. The stairwell door beside it, which was alarmed from the outside but, from the placement of the sensor, only on the outward-opening side.
She breathed again.
Sat there for ten minutes.
The lobby manager — a precise, middle-aged man with the build of someone who had once been athletic and had let it calcify into authority — noticed her after the eighth minute and walked over with the polite urgency of a man doing his job.
"Can I help you, miss?"
