Everyone with something to do and somewhere to be. Elias sat in his chair with his folder and felt the particular invisibility of a person whom a busy room has decided isn’t part of its business. He got up. Cindy’s desk had a small queue in front of it — three people, maybe four — but he didn’t have it in him to go to the back of it.
He’d been waiting long enough. He stepped in at the front, hat in hand, and the woman he’d stepped ahead of made a sound low in her throat and shifted her weight pointedly. The man behind her looked at Elias the way people looked at someone who had just broken an unspoken rule that everyone else had been following without complaint.