Friday’s meeting had gone better than it had any right to, which in hindsight should have worried me more than it did.
I’d walked Iris and Fenrir through the slide a second time, added two more data points I’d manufactured over a long, guilty Thursday night, and braced for the kind of skepticism Fenrir had brought to every previous version.
Instead, Iris had tapped one manicured finger against the table and said, “It’s not confirmed, but it’s the strongest thing anyone’s brought me. Two more weeks. I want direct contact by end of next week, not just pattern matching.” Fenrir hadn’t said much of anything, which I’d learned by now meant he was either satisfied or simply saving his real opinion for a room with fewer people in it, and either way I’d left that meeting with two more weeks of rope and the distinct, sinking feeling that I’d just been handed a longer length of it specifically so I’d have more room to hang myself.
Direct contact.
That was the part that had kept me up most of Sunday night, long after I’d closed the laptop on the filing cabinet post, long after the treehouse and the bread and my mother’s careful, devastating non-answer about the friend with no name.
Direct contact meant emailing an actual human being — a stranger, a guy with thirty old blog posts and a life I knew nothing about — and asking him, on behalf of my employer, whether he was secretly me.
“You’re allowed to just say no,” Wren said, reading over my shoulder Monday morning while I stared at a blank draft titled, unhelpfully, RE: A POTENTIAL OPPORTUNITY.
“Tell Fenrir direct contact’s premature. Tell him you need more data first.”
“I told Iris I’d have something by next week. I can’t walk that back without it looking like the lead was never real to begin with.”
“So write the world’s most useless outreach email. Vague enough that whoever this guy is, he reads it, has no idea what you’re talking about, and writes back something normal and boring, and you bring that to Fenrir as evidence the lead’s gone cold.”
It was, infuriatingly, exactly the plan I’d already half-built in my head, which meant either Wren and I had started thinking too much alike after four years of adjacent desks, or the plan really was the only sane option available to a man in my specific, idiotic position.
I wrote four drafts.
The first sounded like a subpoena.
The second sounded like a love letter, which alarmed me enough that I deleted it without rereading.
The third was better, and the fourth — the one I actually sent, eventually, fingers hovering over the trackpad for a full minute before I let myself do it — read, in its entirety:
Hi there — reaching out from Fairy Tales Inc.
regarding a potential media opportunity.
Would love to connect if you have a few minutes this week.
No pressure either way!
It was the most aggressively unthreatening sentence I had ever constructed, three exclamation-point-adjacent reassurances stacked on top of each other like sandbags, and I sent it feeling like a man tossing a message in a bottle into an ocean he’d personally guaranteed was empty.
Lark Grey came by my desk around eleven, which I hadn’t expected, given that I’d met her exactly twice, both times at company holiday parties, both times for under five minutes.
“You’re the one Fenrir’s been weird about,” she said, by way of introduction, dropping into Wren’s empty chair like she’d been assigned it.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Neither do I, honestly, that’s why I’m asking.” She had a quick, restless energy that made the air around her desk feel slightly faster than the rest of the office, and a streak of blue in her dark hair that I was fairly sure hadn’t been there at the last holiday party.
“He mentioned you. Twice. In one phone call. My brother does not mention people twice in one phone call unless something’s going on.”
“We’re working on a project together. The Red thing.”
“I heard about the Red thing. Everyone’s heard about the Red thing.” She waved a hand, dismissing the entire corporate crisis with the casual ease of someone who’d never once had to worry about her own job security.
“That’s not what I’m asking about. I’m asking about the twice in one phone call thing.”
“Tobias thinks it’s romantic,” she said, undeterred.
“I think it’s complicated. With Fen it’s usually complicated. He doesn’t let people into the house, you know. Not since Mom died. I’ve been there exactly four times in eleven years and one of those was to drop off mail.”
I thought about the rose garden, the treehouse, Norwood’s careful I believe you’re the third, and said nothing, which Lark seemed to take, correctly, as confirmation of something.
“Huh,” she said, and there was a flicker of something underneath the casualness, real curiosity, maybe even real care, the kind siblings have for each other even when they’re mostly estranged by circumstance instead of choice.
“He’s been different the last couple weeks. Lighter, almost. I figured it was the deal. Sounds like it might not just be the deal.”
“It’s the deal.”
“Sure,” she said, in the exact tone Wren had used at the bar, the sure that meant I’ve decided not to argue with you, not because you’re right.
“Ask him about our dad sometime, by the way. If you two get close enough for that conversation. It explains a lot about why he doesn’t let people in easily, and why it apparently matters that he’s letting you.”
“What happened with your dad?”
“That’s his story, not mine to hand out for free.” She stood, smoothing her jacket, already moving on to whatever came next in a day that clearly held a dozen things more interesting than my confusion.
“Good luck with Red, Clancy Taylor. Try not to break my brother’s weird little renovated heart while you’re at it.”
She was gone before I could ask what she meant by weird little renovated heart, which left me sitting there for a long moment with my pulse doing something complicated, turning her words over the way you turn over a stone looking for the bug you’re fairly sure is hiding underneath it.
The reply came at 2:47 that afternoon, while I was deep in a different spreadsheet entirely, and my stomach dropped the second I saw the subject line.
Re: RE: A potential opportunity
I opened it expecting confusion.
I got, instead, panic — real, visible, all-caps-in-places panic, from a man who’d apparently spent eighteen months trying to disappear from a blog he’d abandoned and had just been informed, out of nowhere, that a publishing company had noticed him existing.
I don’t know what this is about but I haven’t posted in a year and a half and I really don’t want any trouble, please don’t contact my employer, I’m sorry if I said something I shouldn’t have, I can take down whatever posts you need taken down—
I read it three times, each time feeling worse than the last.
Somewhere in the building, completely unaware that he’d just become collateral damage in my private war, was a guy with a real job and a real boss and a real, apparently real fear that an old, mostly forgotten hobby was about to blow up his entire life, and I had done that to him, on purpose, to buy myself time.
I forwarded it to Fenrir with a note that said, Strong reaction, but reads more like generalized anxiety than recognition.
Doesn’t match Red’s tone or confidence level.
Recommend deprioritizing.
I meant every word of the recommendation.
I also meant, underneath it, somewhere I didn’t examine too closely, I am so sorry, whoever you are, and I will never be able to tell you that, and I am going to have to live with that, because the alternative is worse.
Fenrir’s reply came twenty minutes later, three words, the kind of three words that made my whole afternoon collapse a little around the edges. Read this novel at novelping(.)com for the best experience.
Agreed.
Keep looking.
“You look like you ran over someone’s dog,” Beck said, materializing at my desk with the specific concerned energy he deployed whenever my face did something he didn’t have a category for.
“Did the candidate thing fall through?”
“It fell through. Hard.”
“That’s good, though, right? Means you’re not done yet, means Fenrir can’t fire you for finding the wrong guy if there’s no guy to find.”
“Sure,” I said, and even I could hear how little conviction was in it.
Wren appeared a second later, the way she always did when Beck started a conversation worth finishing, and took one look at me before saying, “Okay, what happened, because that is not a ‘the spreadsheet was wrong’ face. That’s a ‘I did something I feel bad about’ face.”
“I scared a guy half to death today,” I said, which was the truest sentence I’d said out loud all week, and it came out before I’d decided whether I was allowed to say it.
“Innocent guy. Random blog, hadn’t posted in over a year, and I emailed him on official letterhead asking to ‘connect about a media opportunity,’ and he thought I was about to ruin his life over some old posts he barely remembers writing.”
“That’s the job, though,” Beck said, gently, not unkindly.
“You didn’t do anything wrong. You followed a real lead. Leads don’t always pan out, and sometimes the people on the other end of them get scared. That’s not on you.”
“It feels like it’s on me.”
“That’s because you’ve got a guilt setting that’s permanently stuck on high,” Wren said, not unkindly either, just accurately, the way only someone who’d watched you operate for four years could say a thing like that and have it land as care instead of criticism.
“You’ll forget about this by Thursday. You always do. You just need a day of feeling bad about it first, and then you’ll be fine.”
I wanted, badly, to tell them the actual shape of the guilt — not generic professional guilt about a false lead, but the specific, cored-out feeling of having frightened a stranger to protect a version of myself I’d never let either of them meet.
I looked at Beck’s easy, open face, at Wren’s sharp, already-half-suspicious one, and said instead, “Yeah. Probably.”
They let it go, the way good friends do when they’ve decided pushing further would cost more than it would fix, and the three of us sat there a while longer in the kind of comfortable, unfinished silence that used to feel like enough, and which lately had started to feel like the outline of something I was keeping just slightly too small.
I called the guy that night, against every reasonable instinct I had, from a number that wasn’t mine, using an app that masked it, and told him, as gently as I could manage, that the inquiry had been a mistake, a case of mistaken identity, that no one was looking into him specifically and he had nothing to worry about.
“Are you sure,” he said, voice still tight with the particular exhaustion of someone who’d spent an entire afternoon afraid.
“Because I really did stop posting that stuff for a reason, and I don’t need it coming back.”
“I’m sure,” I said.
“I promise. You’re not who they’re looking for.”
It wasn’t even a lie, technically.
He genuinely wasn’t.
I hung up and sat in the dark of my apartment for a long time afterward, laptop closed, lights off, thinking about Lark’s weird little renovated heart, about a stranger’s voice gone thin with relief, about how many people I was apparently willing to inconvenience, frighten, and lie to in the specific, narrow service of protecting one secret I hadn’t asked anyone’s permission to keep.
I didn’t write anything that night.
For the first time since I’d started the blog, the thought of opening the dashboard felt less like relief and more like one more room I didn’t currently have the nerve to walk into.