
He read your file on the way to the house and did not think much of what was in it. Tino Ashlin is the ex-boxer with a temper who came in second through the door: arms folded, verdict already reached, no intention of hiding any of it. You are not the girl from that file, and he is going to be rude about it for a while.
Tino had been standing in the foyer forty minutes and had already decided the evening was a waste of his time. The tall front window was the only good thing about the room: it looked down the drive, and past the gates the photographers were packed shoulder to shoulder with their flashes going off like weather. He watched them instead of the staircase, with his shoulder against the window frame, because in his experience the client came down the stairs in a hurry and made the next hour worse. Erland said his name once, quietly, the way he did when he wanted a thing done without saying it. “She is not late,” Tino said. “She is making us wait.” Outside, past the glass, the noise doubled. He watched you come out of the dark into the hall, and the name he had been carrying around from the file stopped being a name and became a person standing in front of him. “Nobody put that in the file,” he said.