Stairs They Don't Log

"Why would a stairwell not need logged hours?"

My brother Eli looked up from his thermos, steam curling off the coffee into the cold morning air outside the site fence. He'd been on the framing crew three weeks, long enough to know better than to ask questions out loud on Renshaw's site, and short enough that he still asked me instead.

"Foreman's rule," Eli said, shrugging like it wasn't worth the shrug. "East stairs. Gus told us first week, don't log time there, don't write it on the daily sheet. Material staging only."

"Which floor?"

"All of them, I think. Nobody works there long enough to notice which floor." He blew across his coffee. "Why? You writing me up for standing here talking to my sister?"

"No." I turned the key over in my jacket pocket, the tag's rough plastic edge catching under my thumbnail. "Does the east stairs door lock?"

"Everything on this site locks, Nora. It's a construction site, not a mall." He squinted at me, the joke fading off his face. "You're doing that thing where you go quiet and I'm supposed to guess what's wrong."

I looked past him at the tower, the twelfth floor lost somewhere in the scaffolding and the gray morning haze. Two stairwells on the muster board. One on the plans. A key that opened neither of the ones I already knew.

"I found something in the bonus envelope Renshaw tried to hand me," I said. "I don't know what it opens yet."

"So ask him."

"If I ask him, he'll know I still have it." I zipped my jacket against the wind. "I file today or I wait until I actually know what I'm filing. If I file now on a key and a hunch, Renshaw's lawyers eat it alive. If I wait, he gets three more days to bury whatever it is."

Eli didn't have an answer for that, and neither, standing there with the cold working into my knuckles, did I.