The coffee machine in the break room had been broken for nine days, and in that time it had become a kind of shrine.
Someone had taped a sign to it that said OUT OF ORDER — TALK TO IT GENTLY, and someone else had drawn a small crown on the sign, and nobody had taken either one down, because at Fairy Tales Inc.
we apparently believed that if you ignored a problem with enough sincerity, it became charming instead of broken.
I’d worked there four years.
I still hadn’t decided if that was a metaphor or just a coffee machine.
I went to the one on the third floor instead, which meant walking past Editorial, which meant walking past the wall of framed covers — forty years of retellings, rereleases, the occasional award sticker slapped on a paperback like a gold star on a test you didn’t study for.
My favorite was always the same one: a 1987 edition of something called Thorn and Crown, with a woman on the cover whose hair was doing something gravity had never agreed to.
I didn’t even know what the book was about.
I just liked that it existed, unapologetically, the way you like a dog wearing a sweater it didn’t ask for.
“You’re doing the thing again,” Wren said, appearing at my elbow with the specific menace of someone who’d had exactly one and a half cups of coffee.
“What thing.”
“The wall thing. Where you stand in front of the wall and have feelings at it.”
“I don’t have feelings. I’m assessing cover design trends.”
“You’ve been assessing cover design trends for four minutes and the elevator’s been holding the door for you the whole time.”
It had.
There was a man in a gray suit standing in it, not holding the button so much as radiating the silent fury of someone who would absolutely write an email about this later.
I apologized with my whole face and got in.
Wren got in after me, mostly so she could keep talking.
“Beck says happy anniversary, by the way,” she said.
“To the coffee machine. Nine days. He wants to get it a card.”
“Tell Beck I said the coffee machine and I have nothing to discuss.”
“He’s already drafted something. It rhymes.”
This was the kind of conversation I had most mornings, and most mornings I liked it more than I let on, which was sort of the whole architecture of my personality if you wanted to get reductive about it.
I liked things more than I let on.
I had built an entire blog around the principle.
But that was a nighttime fact, and this was a daytime elevator, so I just said, “Tell him I expect a strong internal rhyme scheme,” and Wren laughed the way she laughed at things that weren’t actually that funny, generously, like she was giving the joke a tip.
My desk was the third one from the window on the fourth floor, in the open-plan section that Marketing shared with Digital, which meant I spent my days flanked by people either designing newsletter graphics or arguing about hashtags, sometimes both, occasionally about the same hashtag.
There was a sticky note on my monitor that I hadn’t written and couldn’t remember receiving, which just said DO IT TODAY in Wren’s handwriting, with no further context, and I’d left it there for two weeks now out of something between superstition and spite.
I had forty-one unread emails and a slush pile spreadsheet that hadn’t been touched since Thursday, and I was three sips into a coffee that had gone lukewarm somewhere between the third floor and my chair when Fenrir’s voice came over the open-plan like weather.
“Taylor. My office.”
He didn’t yell.
That was the thing people who hadn’t worked for Fenrir Grey always got wrong when I tried to explain him — they pictured someone red-faced and loud, pounding on desks, and instead what you got was a man who said five words in a normal volume from thirty feet away and somehow every cubicle went quiet like he’d fired a starting pistol.
He had a voice built for boardrooms.
It worked just as well on an open floor plan, more’s the pity.
I picked up my laptop and went, because four years in, I’d learned that going immediately cost less than going in two minutes, with whatever those two minutes had been spent dreading.
His office had a window that looked out over the river and a desk that was, against all odds, completely clean.
Not organized — clean, like nothing real happened on it, like it was a desk in a furniture catalog that someone had wheeled in here to make a point.
Fenrir himself was not clean in the same way.
He had his sleeves rolled up and a pen behind one ear that he clearly thought was on his desk, and there was a faint groove between his eyebrows that I privately thought of as the Fenrir Line, because it only showed up when something had genuinely gotten under his skin, as opposed to the forty other things a day that merely annoyed him.
The Fenrir Line was visible now.
“Sit,” he said, which I did, and then he didn’t say anything for a second, which was somehow worse than the talking.
“Is this about the Hendrickson manuscript,” I said, because guessing wrong felt better than waiting.
“No.” He turned his laptop around.
“Have you seen this.”
I looked.
It was a blog post.
I recognized the layout before I recognized the words, the way you’d recognize your own house from the wrong angle — the deep red background, the white serif text, the little wolf-howl icon in the corner that I’d commissioned from a freelance illustrator on a website three years ago for forty dollars, back when I still thought of it as a joke I was playing on myself.
It was a post about cover trends.
My cover trends.
Words I had typed at eleven at night four days ago, about gravity-defying hair and gold award stickers, except restructured slightly, sharper in places, with one line about “publishing houses that build entire identities on stories no one in the building seems to actually believe in anymore” that I remembered writing and instantly regretting and not deleting, because I never deleted the ones that scared me a little.
Those were always the ones that did numbers.
“Two point one million shares,” Fenrir said, like he was reading off a stock ticker.
“In four days. On a post about book covers.”
“People like book covers,” I said, in the careful, even voice I used exclusively for conversations about myself in the third person.
It came out steadier than I had any right to expect, given that my own employer was holding up my own brain on his laptop screen and asking me to explain it to him.
“This is the fourth one this month that’s mentioned us by name.” He turned the laptop back around, which felt like being allowed to put my hands down after a search.
“Not the industry. Us. Fairy Tales Inc., specifically, like he works here.”
I did work there.
I almost said it.
I bit it down somewhere behind my teeth, where I kept most of the things I almost said.
“Who is Red,” Fenrir said.
Not a question, exactly.
More like the kind of statement people make when they want you to disagree with them just so they have something to push against.
“Nobody knows,” I said.
“That’s sort of the whole—”
“I know what the whole point is, Taylor.
I read the profile in The Atlantic.
Two billion followers and not one verified photo, not one verified anything, an anonymous account that started as some — ” he made a gesture, the kind that was supposed to stand in for a phrase he didn’t want to dignify with actual words — “teenage venting blog and turned into the most quoted voice on the internet about fairy tales, love, work, all of it.
People build entire podcasts dissecting which posts are about real heartbreak versus which ones are just bits.
There’s a subreddit with four hundred thousand members dedicated to guessing his day job.”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said, which was true in the specific and devastating sense that I had founded it, in spirit, by being bad enough at hiding my schedule that people had started a spreadsheet.
“I want to know who he is.”
“Why?”
It came out faster than I meant it to, and sharper, and for a second the Fenrir Line deepened in a way that made me think I’d overstepped, except then something else moved across his face, something I didn’t have a name for yet, something almost like — recognition wasn’t the right word.
Familiarity, maybe, except that was wrong too, because we’d never talked about anything like this before.
We talked about manuscripts and metrics and, once, memorably, about whether a cover font was “trying too hard,” a phrase he’d used with total sincerity that I’d been quoting to Wren for a year.
“Because,” he said, and the word sat there a second longer than it needed to, “there’s a deal on the table. A book deal, a media deal, the kind of deal that changes what this company is. And it depends on someone walking into a room and putting a face to that account. Iris wants it. The board wants it. I want it.” A pause.
“I’d think you of all people would understand wanting to know who’s been writing your life back at you for years.”
I didn’t understand what he meant by that, not specifically, not yet, but something about the sentence landed somewhere under my ribs anyway, the way certain sentences do before you’ve figured out why.
“I don’t know who he is,” I said, which had the considerable advantage of being, technically, depending on how strictly you wanted to define who, almost not a lie.
Fenrir looked at me for a second too long.
Then he nodded, once, like he was filing something away rather than accepting it, and said, “Get back to the slush pile,” which was apparently the end of the conversation, and I went, because that was how it worked, and because my heart had started doing something irregular and I needed a hallway to do it in privately.
“You look like you saw a ghost,” Beck said, when I dropped back into the chair next to his.
Beck Sparrow had the specific gift of looking permanently seventeen years old despite being thirty-one and married, an unfair genetic trick that I assumed would eventually catch up with him in one terrible birthday.
“Fenrir’s hunting Red.”
Wren’s head came up over the cubicle divider like a periscope.
“The Red? Wolf-howl-icon Red?”
“That Red.”
“Oh, this is going to be a whole thing,” she said, with the deep satisfaction of someone whose week had just gotten more interesting at no personal cost to herself.
“Remember when Marketing tried to do an ‘in conversation with Red’ feature for the newsletter and his people — does he have people? — never responded?”
“He doesn’t have people,” I said, before I could stop myself, and then, “Probably. I assume. How would I know.”
“You read him more than anyone I know,” Beck said, not looking up from his screen, in the absent, unweaponized way he said most things that turned out later to have been entirely correct.
“You quoted that post about the wolf at the wedding toast you wrote for my cousin. The one about how everyone wants to be Red Riding Hood in the story of their life and nobody wants to admit they’ve also been the wolf to somebody.”
“It was a good line.”
“It was a great line. You think Fenrir’s actually going to find him?”
I thought about the deal on the table.
I thought about the Fenrir Line, and the way he’d said who’s been writing your life back at you for years like it cost him something to say it.
I thought, not for the first time and not without a familiar, low-grade dread, about how thin the walls of my life had gotten without my noticing, two rooms I’d built years ago that used to feel separate and now seemed to share more doors than I remembered installing.
“I think,” I said, “he’s going to make me find out.”
Dru caught me by the printer at four, which was its own kind of ambush, since the printer was located in a hallway with exactly one entrance and Dru Ashworth had clearly weaponized this fact for years.
“Fenrir called you into his office today,” she said.
Not a question.
Dru didn’t really ask things; she informed you of them and waited to see how you’d react to being informed.
“He calls a lot of people into his office. It’s sort of the job.”
“He didn’t call me in.” She said it lightly, the way you’d mention the weather, except her eyes did the thing they always did when Fenrir’s name came up, a kind of bright, hungry focus that made me feel, briefly and uncharitably, sorry for her, and then immediately not sorry, because she followed it with: “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Taylor, but he’s not going to wake up one day and need a temp from Digital to feel like his life means something.”
“I genuinely don’t know what we’re talking about.”
“Good,” she said, like I’d confirmed something.
“Keep it that way.” And then she took her printouts and left, heels sharp against the floor, and I stood there holding a single warm page about Q3 engagement metrics, wondering, as I often did around Dru, what exactly I’d done to earn this particular flavor of hostility, beyond existing in a building she also worked in.
My mother called at six fifteen, while I was still on the train, to tell me she’d found a recipe for something called “midnight bread” that required starting the dough at eleven p.m.
and she wanted to know if I’d be home to “supervise the rising,” which was not a thing bread needed but was absolutely a thing my mother wanted company for.
“Dad still on the thorn-less roses?” I asked.
“He’s moved on to a variety that’s apparently extremely susceptible to aphids, so now we’re also doing pest control, so really it’s a whole production over here.” She said this the way she said everything about my father’s garden, equal parts exasperated and besotted, twenty-nine years into a marriage that still seemed to surprise her in a good way most days.
“You sound tired.”
“Work thing.”
“The wolf?”
She meant Fenrir.
She’d never met him, but I complained about him with such specificity and frequency that my mother had taken to calling him “the wolf” two years ago, as a joke, not knowing — not knowing anything, really, about the particular layer of irony she’d accidentally built into the nickname.
“The wolf,” I agreed, and let her tell me about aphids the rest of the way home, grateful, the way I was almost always grateful for my parents, for how little they needed from me beyond just being there on the phone.
I didn’t open my laptop until almost eleven.
I never did it earlier; there was something about the specific quality of nighttime quiet, my apartment finally still, the radiator clanking its one complaint, that made the screen feel less like a stage and more like a window with the curtain pulled back just for me.
I thought about the day.
The post that had made it into Fenrir’s hands.
The deal he wanted.
The word who, sitting in his mouth like he already half-suspected the shape of the answer and didn’t trust himself to say it out loud.
I opened the dashboard.
The cursor blinked in the empty box like it was waiting on me specifically, which I knew was not true, and chose not to examine too closely why it felt that way anyway.
I wrote:
HAPPILY NEVER AFTER on being hunted
So apparently there’s a guy out there — there’s always a guy — who’s decided the most interesting thing about you isn’t anything you’ve said, but the fact that he can’t put a face to the voice.
Funny how that works.
Say something true for ten years and nobody notices.
Say it anonymously and suddenly it’s a mystery worth solving.
Here’s a secret nobody wants: anonymity was never the point.
It was just the only door I could find that didn’t have somebody standing behind it, waiting to tell me I was doing the story wrong.
Everybody’s read Red Riding Hood and decided they know exactly who the wolf is.
Sharp teeth.
Bad intentions.
A grandmother’s house, a basket of bread, a girl who should’ve known better than to talk to strangers in the woods.
Nobody ever asks what the wolf was doing in those woods before the girl showed up.
Nobody wonders if maybe he lived there first.
I’m not saying I forgive him.
I’m saying the story’s a lot less simple once you’ve been both the girl and the thing in the trees, and I have been, more times than I’d like to admit, and so, statistically, probably, so have you.
Anyway.
Somebody’s looking for me.
Let them look.
I’ve gotten very good at not being found.
— R
I read it twice, the way I always did, looking for the line that went too far, the sentence that would crack the door open wider than I meant it to.
I found one — I have been, more times than I’d like to admit — and stared at it for a long minute, my thumb hovering over the trackpad, half my brain telling me to cut it, the other half pointing out, not unkindly, that the ones that scared me a little were always the ones that did numbers.
I hit publish at 11:47 p.m.
and felt, the way I always did, the specific and entirely undeserved relief of a confession nobody could trace back to me.
Two minutes later, my phone buzzed on the nightstand.
Wren, in the group chat, a single message:
wren: RED POSTED.
everyone stop what you’re doing.
I turned the phone face-down, lay back against my pillow, and let myself, for exactly one night more, feel like the safest two people in the world were the one nobody could find and the one nobody was looking for.
I didn’t know yet how badly I had that backward.