I did not want to turn fifty-three years of work over to someone based on one theatrical moment.
I wanted the disguise to reveal character.
Then I would investigate the person properly.
Employment history.
Judgment.
Financial responsibility.
How they treated coworkers when no rich old man was watching.
This was not a lottery.
It was a search.
Still, I admit there was a romantic part of me that wanted the company to go to someone kind.
Lorna would have understood that.
She had always hated how quickly money altered the temperature in a room.
“If you want to know someone,” she once told me, “watch how they speak to a waiter after the order goes wrong.”
I remembered that sentence constantly.
The store I chose was Mercer & Field location 184 in the fictional city of Alderwick.
Large enough to be busy.
Far enough from headquarters that few employees knew my face beyond a framed corporate photograph hanging near the staff office.
I had visited only once, eight years earlier.
Nessa arranged for security to remain aware of me from a distance only in case I genuinely became medically unwell.
No one inside knew.
I went alone.
The automatic doors opened at 11:17 on a Thursday morning.
The smell hit people before they saw me.
I knew because a woman pushing a cart visibly recoiled.
She looked at my coat.
Then my face.
Then sped past.
Fine.
That was information.
I walked slowly toward the grocery section.
My cane clicked against the tile.
Several customers moved around me as though I were a spill nobody had yet marked with a warning sign.
At the bakery counter, I asked a woman in a cream sweater:
“Ma’am, could you spare something to eat?”
She pinched her nose.
“Please don’t come closer.”
“I haven’t eaten today.”
“There are shelters.”
“I know.”
“Then go there.”
She walked away.
A man beside the bread shelves muttered, “They shouldn’t let people like this wander around bothering customers.”
I looked at him.
“People like what?”
He flushed.
Then looked away.
Near aisle seven, I asked a teenage boy holding an expensive phone whether he could buy me a can of beef stew.
He stared.
Then laughed.
“No way.”
“I understand.”
“Wait.”
He lifted his phone.
“Stand there.”
I frowned.
