Turn 7 of 11

Leave the keyboard on Marguerite's desk and walk away

You leave the keyboard on the edge of her desk. It sits between the empty mug and the stacked trays, beige and unremarkable, the unlabelled key catching the desk lamp's circle. You do not push it toward her. You do not slide it back. You just take your hands off it the way you take your hands off something you have decided is not yours to carry.

Marguerite watches you do this. She does not stop you. She does not say anything about the right choice or the wise choice or any of the things someone says when they want credit for a decision that was not theirs. She picks up the empty mug and stands and takes it to the small sink in the corner behind the filing cabinet, and the water runs, and she rinses it with her back to you, and that is the conversation ending — not with words but with the sound of someone washing a cup.

You turn and walk out. The door does not click behind you; it eases shut on its pneumatic hinge, the slow hiss of a door that closes itself without help. The corridor is dim, the emergency lighting pooling amber on the carpet tiles, and the hoover is somewhere to your left, droning behind a closed door. You walk past it, past the break room, past the glass-walled meeting rooms that give you back your reflection — a woman without a keyboard now, walking at the pace of someone who has set something down and is feeling the absence of it in her arms.

The stairwell is cool, the concrete and ductwork exposed, and you climb. Two flights. Your footsteps echo in the shaft the way they did not echo on the carpeted floor, each one distinct, and by the time you push through the fire door onto the main floor the silence up here is the kind that tells you Ellis has gone home. His desk lamp is off. The freight manifest screen has gone to sleep, its standby light pulsing blue-green in the dark. His coffee cup is still there, half-finished, gone cold. His chair is pushed back from the desk at the angle he pushes it when he is coming back, which he is not.

You stand in the aisle between your desk and his. Your desk is empty. The keyboard is gone, which is correct — it is downstairs on Marguerite's desk, where you left it. But the absence of it is louder than its presence was. The desk lamp is off. The monitor is off. There is nothing warm on the surface, nothing unlabelled, nothing waiting. There is only your desk, and Ellis's desk, and the distance between them, which is four feet of carpet tile and eleven years and a Friday suggestion he makes most Thursdays that you have let drop most Fridays because the wall is still standing and you have decided, tonight, to let it stand.

You pick up your bag. You turn off the overhead bank, leaving only the emergency lights, the amber pools that make the floor look like something abandoned mid-sentence. Ellis's coffee cup catches the light. You leave it. He will find it tomorrow, and he will not think about it, and you will be at your desk, and the keyboard will be wherever Marguerite puts the things that get returned, and it will be someone else's warm key on some other Thursday.

You walk to the lift. You press the button. The mechanism engages, the cables pull, and you stand in the amber light and wait for it to arrive, and the building hums around you, standing on every wall it has.