By nine a.m.
the post had four hundred thousand more shares than it had at midnight, and the group chat had become a single unbroken scroll of all caps, and I had read the words wolf and who’s he talking about enough times in enough variations that I’d started to feel like I was watching my own autopsy get live-blogged by people who liked me.
“Did you see the comments,” Wren said, sliding into the seat across from me at the coffee shop downstairs from the office, where we’d taken to having what she called “emergency stand-ups” whenever something happened that wasn’t technically an emergency but felt like one before ten a.m.
“Somebody did a whole thread connecting the wolf thing to that post from two years ago about his dad. People think Red has a complicated relationship with his father.”
“That tracks,” I said, into my cup, because it was easier to agree with a stranger’s wrong guess than correct it with a right one.
“Beck thinks it’s about an ex. I think it’s about a boss. There’s a really vocal contingent on the subreddit who think it’s a metaphor for capitalism, which, I mean, sure, everything’s a metaphor for capitalism if you squint.”
“What do you think it’s about?”
She looked at me for a second longer than the question warranted, and something in my chest did the thing it always did when Wren looked at me like that, a kind of low hum of does she know, could she possibly know, before she shrugged and said, “I think it’s about somebody he used to be close to. The ‘lived there first’ line. That’s not capitalism. That’s a person.”
I didn’t say anything.
I drank my coffee and let the quiet sit there until it didn’t feel like an answer anymore, which Wren, mercifully, let me do, because four years of friendship had taught her exactly how far she could push before I’d go somewhere she couldn’t follow.
Fenrir’s summons came at eleven, not over the open floor this time but through an actual email, subject line just my name, body just now, which felt like an escalation even though it was technically less dramatic than yesterday.
His office still had the too-clean desk.
Today it also had Iris Snow standing at the window with her arms crossed, which meant whatever this was, it had climbed at least one floor since I’d last been summoned.
I’d met Iris exactly four times in four years, which felt like a low number for a CEO of a company with under two hundred employees, until you understood that Iris ran the place the way you’d run a household with one extremely competent staff and total faith they didn’t need supervising.
She had a way of looking at you that made you feel both completely seen and entirely unbothered about it, somehow at the same time, the specific gift of someone who had decided a long time ago that most problems solved themselves if you waited them out with good posture.
“Clancy,” she said, like we did this all the time.
“Sit.”
I sat.
Fenrir didn’t, which meant he was standing behind his own desk in his own office like a man waiting to be invited into it, which told me more about the actual hierarchy in that room than anything either of them would say out loud.
“The Red situation,” Iris said, “has become a board situation.”
“I heard there was a deal,” I said, carefully.
“There’s a deal, and there’s a window, and the window’s about the size of a long weekend.” She finally turned from the window, and the look she gave me was kind in a way that made me immediately suspicious of whatever was coming next, because in my experience kindness right before a request was rarely free.
“Sterling-Vance wants to acquire the publishing rights to a Red anthology — essays, posts, the whole thing, packaged and bound — and they want exclusivity, and they want it signed by a real, identifiable human being who can do a press tour, and they want it inside two weeks, or the offer goes to whoever gets there first. There are at least three other houses sniffing around this. Maybe more.”
“And nobody knows who he is.”
“Nobody official,” Fenrir said, finally sitting, finally human-sized again instead of looming-CEO-adjacent.
“Which is where you come in.”
I had, somewhere between the coffee shop and this office, half-convinced myself that I’d misread yesterday, that the who is Red conversation had just been Fenrir thinking out loud, the way bosses do, performing concern about a problem they had no intention of actually assigning to anyone.
I had been wrong in a way that was about to become extremely relevant to my entire life.
“You run our digital strategy,” Fenrir said.
“You track engagement, you understand the platforms, you’ve built half our social presence from nothing. If anyone in this building has a shot at tracing an anonymous account back to a real identity using legitimate digital footprint analysis—not hacking, not anything that’ll get us sued, just pattern work—it’s you.”
“There are firms that do this,” I said, which was true, and also the single most idiotic sentence I had ever said in a professional setting, because it was the sentence of a man trying to talk himself out of a job he was uniquely, catastrophically qualified for.
“We don’t have two weeks to hire a firm and brief them,” Iris said.
“We have two weeks, period. You already know the account. You already know the audience. You start today.”
“What happens if I can’t find him?”
The Fenrir Line appeared, briefly, and then smoothed back out, which I’d learn later was its own kind of tell, the version of his face he used when he was choosing not to let something show.
“Then we lose the deal,” Fenrir said.
“And given what this deal is worth to this company right now, given where our numbers have been the last two quarters, given that I have already gone to bat for this acquisitions budget twice this year — I’d be having a very different conversation with you. One that involves your employment status.”
He said it flatly, the way you’d state the temperature outside, but underneath the flatness was something that didn’t sound like a threat so much as a man reciting a sentence he’d already had to defend to someone above him, and didn’t enjoy repeating.
“End of week,” Iris said, gentler than Fenrir, which was somehow worse, because gentle deadlines feel more like disappointments-in-waiting than firm ones do.
“Friday. If you’ve got a name, even an unconfirmed one, we can work the rest. If you don’t—” She didn’t finish it.
She didn’t need to.
I said, “I’ll see what I can do,” in the voice of a man who had just been handed the single easiest and most impossible task of his professional life, and left the office before either of them could see whatever was happening on my face, because I genuinely did not know what was happening on my face, and that felt like information I didn’t want to give away for free.
I spent the next two hours doing nothing, professionally.
I opened a blank spreadsheet titled RED — INVESTIGATION and stared at it the way you’d stare at a ransom note addressed to yourself.
I typed Location: unknown and then deleted it, because it wasn’t unknown, it was four blocks from my apartment, in the same neighborhood I’d lived in for six years, and writing unknown felt like the kind of lie that comes back to bite you, even in a spreadsheet nobody else would read.
Then I typed, Posting schedule: irregular, weighted toward late evening, occasional 3am outliers during high-stress periods, which was real analysis, true and useful and entirely traceable back to a guy whose stress periods I happened to have extremely intimate knowledge of, and I deleted that too, slower this time, watching the cursor eat the words one at a time like it was doing me a favor.
What I needed, I realized somewhere around hour three, staring at a cold cup of tea I didn’t remember making, was not to find Red.
I needed to almost find Red.
I needed to produce, by Friday, a trail of breadcrumbs convincing enough to buy time and vague enough to lead nowhere, a fictional near-miss elaborate enough to satisfy a CEO and a board and a man whose job apparently depended on my competence at finding myself.
It was, I thought, possibly the most absurd professional position any human being had ever occupied, and also — and this part I didn’t examine too closely, because examining it felt dangerous — it was the first time in four years that anything at Fairy Tales Inc.
had made me want to laugh.
“You look like someone gave you a raise and also told you your dog died,” Beck said, appearing at my desk with the specific concerned energy of someone who’d noticed I hadn’t moved in ninety minutes.
“Fenrir wants me to find Red.”
Beck’s face did several things in quick succession — surprise, delight, a kind of professional alarm on my behalf, and then, finally, a slow grin that I recognized as the precursor to him saying something unhelpful but completely correct.
“That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all year,” he said.
“It’s not funny, it’s a fireable offense if I don’t manage it by Friday.”
“No, I mean — Clance. You. You’re supposed to find Red.” He said it again like repetition might help me understand the joke he was apparently the only one in on.
“You’ve read every post the guy’s ever written. You quoted him at my wedding. You once got into an actual argument with a stranger on the train because they said his stuff was ‘overrated,’ and I had to physically walk you to a different car.”
“That was a bad train ride for everyone.”
“My point is you’re basically the world’s foremost expert on a guy nobody can identify. If anyone’s qualified, it’s you.” He clapped me on the shoulder, entirely unaware of the precise, surgical accuracy of what he’d just said.
“You’ll figure it out. Worst case, you tell Fenrir you got close and ran out of runway. He’s intense, but he’s not unreasonable. Mostly.”
“You think?”
“I think,” Beck said, already wandering back toward his own desk, “that for a guy who’s about to go hunt down the internet’s most famous recluse, you seem remarkably uninterested in actually starting.”
He wasn’t wrong.
I just couldn’t tell him why.
Wren found a different angle entirely, later, over the kind of lukewarm office pizza that always showed up on days when somebody upstairs felt guilty about something.
“You could just make something up,” she said, through a mouthful of pepperoni.
“Like, a fake suspect. Buy yourself time. Give Fenrir a name, let it not pan out, look diligent in the meantime.”
I stopped chewing.
“I’m joking,” she said, “mostly,” and then, watching my face do whatever it was doing, added, more carefully, “Clancy. You okay? You’ve had a weird week.”
“It’s been a weird week.”
“You’ve gone quiet-weird, not regular-weird. Regular-weird is funny. This is the other one.”
I thought about telling her.
Genuinely, for a full three seconds, I thought about it — Wren, who’d known me since my second week at the company, who’d guessed correctly about the wolf line being a person and not a metaphor, who was, of every single human being in that building, the one most likely to keep a secret out of pure stubborn loyalty rather than any particular sense of obligation to me.
Then I thought about Dru by the printer.
I thought about a subreddit with four hundred thousand members.
I thought about the version of myself that existed only at eleven p.m., the one nobody at this company had ever met, the one I’d built specifically so there’d be one room in my life nobody could walk into uninvited.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Just don’t love being told my job security depends on finding a guy who doesn’t want to be found.”
“That does sound bad when you put it that way.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“It really does.”
My mother called again that night, this time about the actual midnight bread, which had apparently risen wrong and needed what she called “a council,” by which she meant she wanted me on speakerphone while she poked at dough and narrated her own uncertainty.
“You’re distracted,” she said, twenty minutes in, somewhere between should this be stickier and I think I added too much rosemary.
“Work thing.”
“Another wolf thing?”
“A different wolf thing. Same wolf.”
“He certainly keeps you busy for someone you complain about constantly.” I could hear my father in the background, saying something I couldn’t make out, and my mother laughing at it, the easy private laugh of two people who’d built an entire language out of decades of small jokes.
“Your father says tell the wolf he should try the bread. Fixes everything, apparently. According to your father. Who has never made bread in his life.”
“I’ll pass that along.”
“You sound tired, sweetheart.”
“I’m okay, Mom.”
“You always say that right before you go quiet for a few days,” she said, lightly, the way she said the things that mattered most, like she’d practiced making them sound unimportant so I wouldn’t flinch away from them.
“Just — call if the quiet gets too loud. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I meant it when I said it.
I usually did, in the moment, on the phone, surrounded by the sound of her kitchen and the specific safety of being someone’s child instead of someone’s employee.
It was only afterward, alone again, that the meaning ever seemed to slip out of my hands.
I didn’t post anything that night.
I opened the dashboard out of habit and then just sat there, looking at the blinking cursor, thinking about a spreadsheet with one true line in it that I’d deleted twice.
Somewhere out there, on a different screen, Fenrir Grey was probably looking at the same blank space I was, on his end of an investigation he didn’t know was already solved, chasing a person who was, at that exact moment, four blocks from his own house, lying in bed, doing absolutely nothing to be found.
I closed the laptop without writing a word, which felt, for the first time in years, like the loudest thing I’d done all day.