Chapter 4

The silence stretched and held like a rubber band pulled too tight. Cora watched the words land on each face at a different speed: Derek's grin went rigid, Priya's sharp brows drew down, Arman's cold expression flickered into something uncertain. J. Mercer, at the far desk, had gone very still, and Cora saw him look at the delivery receipt lying in the open folder on the desk, then back at her.

Derek recovered first. "What did you just say?"

"I said I signed for that car this morning," Cora repeated. "There's a delivery receipt on the desk at the back. You can check the signature. It's mine."

Derek laughed, but the laugh was thinner now, less certain. "Okay, sure. You signed for it. You're a lot more than a barista, then — you're also a delivery driver. Congratulations. That must pay better than tips."

He looked at Priya, expecting her to join him, but Priya was not looking at him anymore. She was looking at J. Mercer, who had picked up the delivery receipt and was holding it very carefully, reading it with the focused attention of a man putting puzzle pieces together in real time.

"Arman," Priya said, in a voice that was suddenly very cool, "who signed for the car?"

Arman's radio came down. He looked at the receipt in J. Mercer's hands, and then he looked at Cora, and his face went through a series of small, precise adjustments that Cora recognized. She had seen this face before, in negotiation rooms and board meetings and family dinners: the face of a man who had just discovered he was standing in the wrong room with the wrong person and was calculating how to get out of it.

"A security protocol," Arman said. "High-value deliveries require a secondary signature from a company officer. Standard procedure." He was not looking at Cora when he said it. He was looking at Derek, and there was something careful in his voice, something almost apologetic, as though he were about to deliver news he had not wanted to deliver.

"Okay," Derek said, "great, that's a standard procedure, I don't care about your delivery forms. I asked who signed for the car."

J. Mercer walked the receipt across the showroom floor. He moved slowly, the way a man moves when he is carrying something fragile, and he held the paper out to Derek with the reverence of a clerk producing an important document. On it, in Cora's neat, unhurried handwriting, was a signature: *C. Weiss*.