Turn 12 of 12

Check Chad's folder for annotations from Nadine

It's 4:47 when you take the stairs down. The building is emptying — you can feel it in the way the elevator shafts go quiet, the way the fluorescent hum shifts from its daytime pitch to something thinner. Your badge is warm. The basement door opens before you touch it.

The cabinet is where it's always been. You pull the drawer labeled FLOOR 3 — ACCOUNTS, and Chad's folder is right in front, crisp and untouched, the tab reading exactly what it read Friday: CHAD REYNOLDS — SR. ANALYST — 'ABRASIVE, TAKES CREDIT.' You slide it out and open it on top of the cabinet, and the felt-tip is clipped to the frame where you left it, waiting like a pen always waits — patient, indifferent to what it's used for.

The first page is a personnel form. Standard. Name, hire date, department, reporting line, the kind of document that looks the same in every company in every city. The second page is a personality assessment, same format as yours — but where yours said MODERATE RISK, Chad's says LOW RISK. RETENTION RECOMMENDATION: RETAIN. The typed profile reads 'confident, results-oriented, direct communicator.' Direct communicator. You almost laugh. The third page is a handwritten note from Nadine, same round warm loops, and it says: 'Chad is a good first file. Nothing here that can't be softened. Start with the tab — the personality profile is just a description. The tab is the instruction. You'll feel it when it takes.'

You flip to the fourth page. It's blank.

Not blank like yours was blank, with the quality of a page that's waiting. Blank the way a page is blank when no one has ever needed to write on it. No correspondence, no annotations, no second voice in the margin. Chad's folder has three pages. Yours has four. You stand there with the folder open and the boiler humming behind you and the cold settling in, and you think about what it means that Nadine left a note in Chad's folder directing you — you specifically, by implication — to start with him, and what it means that your folder has a page Chad's doesn't, and what it means that she's been writing to you in a space she created.

You close Chad's folder and slide it back into the drawer. Your own folder is behind it. You don't pull it out. You already know what's on the fourth page — your words, her reply, your question. 'How did you open the drawer? The badge was with me. You could have changed my tab. You didn't. Why?' The question is sitting in the cabinet right now, waiting for an answer, and you wonder if she's already read it, if she reads everything the moment it's written, if the cabinet tells her. You close the drawer and the rails click shut and you stand in the basement with your hands empty and the badge warm against your chest, and the building above you is almost empty, and somewhere in it Nadine Cho is either at her desk or not at her desk, and the difference between those two things might be the same as the difference between a ghost and a person who simply stopped being where people look.