Turn 4 of 12

Put your folder back and close the drawer before the footsteps arrive

Your hands move before your head catches up. You slide your folder back into its slot — behind Chad's, deeper in the drawer — and the manila edge catches for a half-second on the rail before settling in. The felt-tip pen goes back into its clip on the cabinet frame. You push the drawer shut and the rails swallow it with a sound like a slow exhale, metal on metal, final. The tab disappears behind the cabinet's face. EAGER, OBSERVANT, MANAGEABLE. Still there. Still yours. You didn't change it. You wrote on the page and the page didn't answer, and now the folder is filed away with your handwriting inside it like a letter you mailed to yourself without reading first.

The sticky note is on the floor. You consider picking it up and then you don't. The pink is very bright against the oatmeal carpet, brighter than anything in this basement should be, and leaving it there feels like the only honest thing you've done all evening. Your hands are still cold. The boiler has kicked back on and the air carries that particular warmth of steam pipes in a room that was never meant to be comfortable.

The stairwell door opens. Not dramatically — no creak, no slam — just a quiet latch release and then the soft sound of sensible shoes on concrete. You turn around. She's already halfway across the room.

Nadine Cho. You've seen her once before, in the elevator, the day you got the badge. She'd been standing by the panel in a grey cardigan that looked like it cost more than your weekly pay, reading something on her phone. She'd glanced at the badge on your lanyard and smiled — just smiled, small and warm, like you'd passed a test you didn't know you were taking. Now she's walking toward you across the basement floor with the same smile, and it's the same smile from the sticky note, round and deliberate and pleased with itself.

'There you are,' she says. Her voice is warm, the kind of warm that makes you check whether you're cold. 'I thought you'd still be upstairs pretending to alphabetize. But you found it.' She stops a few feet from the cabinet, hands in her cardigan pockets, posture easy. She looks at the closed drawer, then at you, then down at the pink sticky note on the floor. Her smile doesn't falter, but it deepens at the corners, the way a dimple deepens. 'You've been busy. How much did you read?'