veryone at klein & Saunders dresses to project style; it’s part of their job to anticipate trends. This old fellow isn’t wearing a suit of modern cut. He isn’t even wearing a suit. His blazer and trousers are mismatched. Maybe his eyesight is to blame; he wears crooked glasses, thick-lensed and paint-flecked. There’s paint on his mustache, too. His bow tie, at least, is clean, though she’s never seen a bow tie in this office before. It has its charm, though, just as the toupee does, though she doubts it’s the kind of charm he intended. Lainie wants to protect him, this grandfather figure, from the pack of wolves kept beyond the frosted glass door.

She recognizes him as Giles Gunderson right away.

“You must be Miss Strickland.” He beams and strides forward.

On his phone calls, of which there have been many, it has always been “Miss Strickland”—not “honey,” not “toots.” For his polite, dogged pursuit of a single meeting with Bernie, Mr. Gunderson has become Lainie’s favorite freelancer—and least favorite as well. Favorite because talking with him is like talking with the gentle grandfather she never knew. Least favorite because it is her job to pass along Bernie’s hogwash excuses and hold back apologies when she hears, popping through the telephone, the cracks of Mr. Gunderson’s pride.

He reaches to shake her hand, an unusual gesture. “Oh! You’re married. All this time, I should’ve been saying, ‘Mrs. Strickland.’ How rude of me.”

“Not at all.” The truth is that she likes it, the same as how she likes that everyone here calls her Elaine. “And you have to be Mr. Gunderson.”

“Giles, please. My royal processional must have tipped you off. The heraldic displays and tableaux vivants.”

Desk work has taught Lainie to hold her smile regardless of confusion or embarrassment. Mr. Gunderson—Giles, what a suitable name—senses it straightaway and offers an apologetic chuckle.

“Forgive my obtuseness. I toddle around most days without a single person following a word of my nonsense. It makes me ever so popular.”

He smiles, and it is so sincere, so patient, so absent of ulterior design, that she has to fold her hands or else risk reaching out to take his again. It makes her feel silly, and she looks at the appointment book to hide her blush.

“Let’s see, I have you down for a 9:45 with Mr. Clay.”

“Yes and I’m fifteen minutes early. Always be ready to go, that’s my motto.”

“Can I get you some coffee while you wait?”

“I wouldn’t say no to some tea, if you have it.”

“Oh! I don’t think we have tea. It’s coffee all the time here.”

“That’s too bad. They used to keep tea. Perhaps just for me. Coffee—a barbaric drink. That poor, tortured bean. All that fermenting and husking and roasting and grinding. And what is tea? Tea is dried leaves rehydrated. Just add water, Mrs. Strickland. All living things need water.”

“I never thought about it like that.” An arch remark comes to mind; typically she would bottle it, but next to this man, she feels safe. She leans in. “Maybe I’ll serve only tea from now on. Turn all these grabby apes into gentlemen.”

Giles claps his hands together. “Capital idea! Why, the next time I come, I expect your ad men to be wearing cravats and discussing the finer points of cricket. And we will serve only tea, Mrs. Strickland. You must get used to using the royal we.”

The telephone rings, then rings again, two lines at once, and Giles bows and sits, keeping his portfolio case at his feet like a dog. By the time Lainie is finished telling Bernie’s secretary that Giles has arrived and routing the calls, a trio of execs from a detergent company has arrived at the desk, all of them clearing throats, and after them, a bald-headed duo she knows has been giving Klein & Saunders headaches about a kitty-litter campaign. A half hour of appeasement passes before Lainie has a moment to breathe, at which point she notices Giles Gunderson still sitting there.

The lobby, by strategy, has no clock, but Lainie keeps one on her desk. She makes a surreptitious study of Giles and decides that his unmovable smile is his way of bracing against inevitable affront. Lainie considers darting through the office to see if any of the secretaries have tea, the manna that might set Giles at ease. Instead she waits, and waits, until the insult of Bernie’s lateness hangs in the room like oily exhaust from a backfiring bus. The brume thickens as thirty minutes becomes forty, and forty creeps, at the pace of a fraying rope, toward one hour.

Each passed second further instills Giles’s profile with nobility. There is something familiar about his bearing. When Lainie recognizes it, she catches her breath. It is the same poise she saw reflected in the ladies’ room mirror during her first week at Klein & Saunders as she’d adjusted hair and makeup and practiced her defenses against butt pinches. It had been part of the Elaine Strickland she’d developed apart from her husband—the Elaine Strickland she’s still developing. She’d raised her chin so high she’d almost looked down her nose, and that’s what Giles is doing, constructing, as grandly as necessary, a fantasy of his importance.

They have nothing in common—she the young wife and he the doddery gent—and yet for that instant seem to Lainie to be more alike than any two people on earth. It is too much for her to take. She places on her desk the placard she uses for bathroom breaks (SEAT YOURSELF, BE RIGHT BACK!) and, without allowing herself a chance to think better of it, plunges through the frosted-glass door and into the office.