Several more days passed, and the tension inside the office grew thick enough to taste. The hooded figure on the security footage had been impossible to identify, but small pieces of circumstantial evidence began to surface, all of them pointing in the same direction.
A junior analyst on the third floor claimed she had seen Aaron lingering near the mail room on the morning the latest note appeared. Another coworker mentioned that Aaron had asked, casually, whether Aria was still “seeing that club guy.” A security guard at Aria’s apartment building reported that a man matching Aaron’s description had been spotted near the visitor parking lot twice in the past week. None of it was proof, but it was enough to make people talk.
Sophia was the loudest.
“I knew it,” she said one afternoon, le
