HIS WIFE HIRED ME TO BE INVISIBLE

CHAPTER 4: THE MORNING

My name was not on board. Standing in the doorway of the driver’s room, I glanced at the full-day schedule displayed on the wall.

Morning runs. Afternoon runs. Evening transfers. Every slot had a name on it.

I couldn’t find mine.

For eight months, the first thing I checked every morning was the working day schedule on that board. And now my name was not there.

Something tightened in my chest. I am about to lose what I had worked so hard for eight months to build. I walked to my desk, sat down, and opened the scheduling system on my screen.

My name had been moved to the afternoon schedule. A driver I had seen just twice took both morning slots. He was new and young. He did not know what entrance Camilla preferred or that the radio had to be turned down before getting close to the car.

He would learn. That was not the point.

It was in the mornings that Camilla made critical decisions. Those decisions led to places in the afternoons. She moved me from helping make those decisions to just arriving.

That was not just an administrative change; that was management decision.

I checked my messages. Nothing from Camilla. Nothing from the scheduling system. Nothing from the HR.

Nothing was louder in my inbox.

One side of the room had a glass partition. I could see the main lobby through it.

I had spent eight months on this side of the mirror. “Watching the lobby without being asked. Without announcing it.

I turned three steps to the glass. I opened a document on my screen. Anyone who bothered to look would think I was working.

I watched the lobby.

The new driver came in at seven fifty-two. He was wearing the correct uniform and had a coffee cup in his hand.

The drivers for Camilla don’t bring coffee cups into the building. She said it in her second week. Not as a rule. Just as an observation. She would watch and allow you to learn. She wanted you to know it was a rule.

He would learn it the way I learnt things that she never said out loud.

I watched as he took the keys and walked to the garage. I turned back to my screen.

Camilla walked through the lobby at four minutes after eight. She wore her coat and held her phone. The forward hunch that said she had made up her mind about the shape of her morning and was already in it.

She walked to the lift. She did not look at the driver's room.

Through the glass, I felt the particular weight of being ignored.

She had looked at the driver's room every day for eight months. Not me specifically. The glass. The fact that the car existed in her structure. Today she had no glass. She passed it the way she had walked past the plant in the corner of her lobby. She put it there once and never looked at it again.

I was the plant today. That feeling hurt me. Not humiliation. Not anger. Something more precise. She had decided I was not worth watching. Or she had concluded that I already knew too much to be worth acknowledging. Both ideas lingered with me while I was in the driver’s room. I could not pick which one hurt the most.

I wrote the time in my phone notes. Eight-o-four.

The morning went on without me. The lift indicator moved. People crossed the lobby. The receptionist manned the desk with the ease of someone doing it for years.

At eight forty-seven, the spinning door turned.

Alex came in.

I knew his walk. Eight months of observation from the front row. Today, he had the forward move that meant he was coping with something he wasn’t going to name. He held his phone in his hand, and his thumb was not moving on the screen. He was listening to something.

He crossed the lobby. Reached the reception counter. He was still on the phone.

Then he stopped. He brought something out of his jacket pocket. He was looking at the counter in front of him, but not directly. Instead, he stared into space in that distinctive way that only someone listening can replicate.

The thing on the counter was a small dark object. He turned from it toward the elevator. He pressed a button and entered. I checked the floor indicator.

Seven.

Even before I felt like writing anything, my pen was moving in my notes. I wrote seven

next to the postcode for the storage unit beside the second GPS location. That’s where I drove to three nights ago. Same number. Different buildings. Same man.

I took note of that small dark object on the reception counter without touching it.

Every key tag in the Vance fleet passed through my hands at least once in the past eight months. I knew their weight, their plate numbers. Each one was specific. I had made it my business to get to know them the way I had made it my business to know the routes and the entrances, and what temperature Camilla liked in the back seat. The key tag on the counter was not part of the fleet. I knew this before I picked up the phone.

I raised my phone and got the right angle through the glass and the overhead lights. Then I took three photographs. The third one was clear enough.

There was a plate number with six digits. Her name was followed by a letter I did not know. I wrote one word to B: “Holdings.” Then I placed my phone face down on the desk.

The phone shook on the desk surface. I felt it through the wood before I heard it.

I counted to five, then I picked it up.

It was a five-word message from B.

‘’That is not a car.’’

I read it twice for four seconds.

I sent a one-word reply after four seconds. I had spent more time just deciding whether to send the word in the first place. Four seconds is not search time. It was recognition time.

B had been monitoring that key tag before I took its picture. Which meant the Board had been inside this building.

My jaw tightened.

I was not the only one watching him. But I am the only one who knew what he ate for breakfast, which entrance he liked to come in through, how his walk sounded when he was managing something rather than deciding on it.

The Board had surveillance. I had attention. Those were not the same things.

Phone notes: Holdings. Seven. Storage unit postcode. The key tag photograph. The coffee cup that the new driver had been holding.

I had to tell myself this was map of my situation. A way to fix what I was into. That was true. But every point on the map was tied to one thing. After the gate, this was something I had gotten to know. It felt sure now.

Not just mapping a mess.

Mapping a man. And the more I thought about it, the clearer it became that safety was never what the map was all about. The map is how I kept close to someone I wasn’t allowed to be close to. Every floor number, plate code, and Holdings connection was a repetition of the same act: drawing someone’s attention, who never looked directly at me but left something for me to find.

I did not look at what that meant. I shut the screen like I shut every screen once I had extracted what I needed from it.

I opened the fleet management application on my phone. Every Vance vehicle had an interior camera. Only the senior drivers for all seventeen vehicles could turn on the camera. None of the drivers had ever used the camera.

During my ride for the afternoon returns, I turned on the interior camera.

Now it was watching the back seat of my car, starting from this afternoon.

I looked through the glass wall of the schedule board and saw the key tag hidden on the front desk.

Camilla had removed something from the wall. Alex had left the key tag on the desk. Was this intentional? Did he see me through the glass when he came in? Did he leave the key tag for me? Or did I just spot it? I did not know.

Afternoon runs start at two. I had taken a photograph of the key tag. I had replied to a message in four seconds. The fleet camera was now on in a car whose back seat was where secret things happened. I had previously been paid to ignore it. All these happened within a short time. I still had six hours left until the start of my duty.

From this morning to eight-o-four, everything had changed. The board still had someone else’s name on it. Although the driver’s room looked the same, I felt different inside. I closed my phone notes.

The NDA has not been signed yet. I was still watching. making a secret map I was not meant to make.

Someone else’s name had replaced my morning slot on the scheduling board.

I stared at my screen and waited for two o’clock.

END