Turn 9 of 12

Skip stand-up and head straight to the basement

The lobby clock reads 8:47. Stand-up is in Conference Room B, thirteen minutes from now, and you can see people funneling toward it — travel mugs, laptops, the shuffle of Monday-morning feet on carpet tile. You turn left instead of right. The stairwell door is heavier than you remember, or your arms are lighter, or the building is paying attention to which way you go. Your badge is warm against your sternum as you descend.

The basement door sighs open before you touch the handle. It remembers you. The air inside is toner and cold concrete and the faintly mineral smell of standing water near the boiler, which is humming at full power like it's been waiting for someone to keep it company. The cabinet is where you left it, grey and four-drawered, patient as furniture. You pull the drawer labeled FLOOR 3 — ACCOUNTS.

Chad's folder is where it should be. CHAD REYNOLDS — SR. ANALYST — 'ABRASIVE, TAKES CREDIT.' The tab is crisp, the felt-tip letters sharp, nothing softened or blurred. You didn't touch it Friday and nothing touched it over the weekend. Chad is upstairs right now, being abrasive, taking credit, exactly himself. Your own folder is behind his, deeper in the drawer, and you pull it out with two fingers.

The tab is the same. BROOKE TANAKA — TEMP, RECORDS — 'EAGER, OBSERVANT, MANAGEABLE.' But the page — the fourth page, the one you wrote on — is different. Your handwriting is there: BROOKE TANAKA. NOT MANAGEABLE. RECORDS — ACTING ARCHIVIST. The words are smaller than you remember writing them. Tighter. And underneath, in handwriting that isn't yours — round, warm, those same deliberate loops — there is a new line: 'We'll see about that. — N.'

The boiler hums. You hold your folder open in both hands and stare at Nadine's reply, and the ink looks fresh, or the paper looks fresh, or something about the page has the quality of a surface that was recently touched. She wrote back. She opened the cabinet over the weekend — but the badge was with you, clipped to your lanyard, in your apartment. The badge is supposed to be the only key. You hold it now, warm against your chest, and the drawer is open, and somewhere upstairs Chad is standing in Conference Room B saying something that makes everyone wince, and Nadine Cho is somewhere in this building, and she wrote on your page without a key.