LAST SEEN WITH HIM

THE KITCHEN FLOOR

That night I went home to my apartment in Wicker Park and sat on my kitchen floor. Not out of despair, exactly. It was something I had done since college — the floor, for

reasons I had never fully examined, had always felt more honest than furniture when I

needed to think clearly. My roommate at Columbia, a warm and practical woman

from Minnesota named Beth, had found me there enough times that she had

eventually stopped asking and started just bringing me tea, which was the kindest

thing anyone had ever done for me and which I had not forgotten in the five years

since we had last lived in the same city. I had been in this apartment for seven months. It was the apartment I had moved into

after Daniel, which was how I had begun organizing time in my head — before

Daniel and after Daniel, the way people organize time around significant weather

events. It was a one-bedroom on the second floor of a brownstone on Damen Avenue,with tall windows that let in good light in the mornings and a kitchen that was too

small for anything ambitious and a bathroom tile that had a crack running from the

faucet to the drain that the landlord had been meaning to fix since August. I had put a

plant on the windowsill and a photograph of my mother on the bookshelf and a rug I

had found at the Logan Square market for thirty dollars that was the exact green of the

blanket I had slept under as a child, and it was mine in the way that places become

yours when you have chosen them in a hard moment, with clear eyes and no illusions. I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet and Sasha Reeves' note

unfolded on my knee. If you are reading this, you have my job. My name is Sasha Reeves. Don't trust him. I had spent the better part of the afternoon in a state of functional

compartmentalization, which was another skill journalism had given me — the ability

to file a disturbing thing away in a sealed folder in my mind and operate normally

around it until I had the time and space to open the folder carefully, away from

everyone. The two o'clock had gone well. I had tabbed the regional risk summary

correctly and Cole had not looked at it during the meeting because he had not needed

to, but Robert Ashby had, twice, and each time he had found exactly what Cole

needed him to find. After Ashby had left I had sat in on a conference call with

Whitmore Capital's Singapore office, taking notes, and then worked through a stack

of correspondence that had accumulated during Cole's travel. He had reviewed my

notes at six-fifteen, standing at his desk, and made two brief corrections and said

nothing else, which Gerald Hast, catching my expression in the corridor afterward, told me in a low, amused voice translated loosely to high praise. I had eaten a sandwich at my desk at three. I had drunk two cups of coffee and one

glass of water. I had not thought about the note. Now I was thinking about the note. I typed Sasha Reeves Chicago into my phone. The results came back thin. A LinkedIn profile — private, no photo visible without a

connection. A mention in a 2022 university alumni newsletter from DePaul, brief, a

line about a graduate entering the private equity sector. Nothing recent. No social

media I could find under that name, or none that was publicly searchable, which in

itself was a data point. Twenty-five-year-olds — she had graduated in 2022, which

put her at approximately my age — did not typically vanish from the internet

voluntarily. They pruned it, curated it, sometimes locked it down, but there was

almost always a thread visible to the public. Some small proof of existence. There was almost none. I tried Sasha Reeves Whitmore Capital. Nothing. I tried Sasha Reeves missing Chicago.

Nothing that matched. I sat with that for a moment. The absence of information can mean many things. It can

mean a person is private by nature, careful with their digital footprint, the kind of

person who had read enough about data vulnerability to make deliberate choices. It

can mean a person has been deliberately removed from the public record by someone

with the resources to do it. It can mean a person has simply left and not been notable

enough in their departure to generate coverage. It can mean other things too, and I did not let myself think about those yet because it

was my first day and I was sitting on a kitchen floor in Wicker Park and the medical

bills were still face-down on the counter and I needed this job with an urgency that I

could not afford to complicate with a mystery I had no evidence yet warranted

complicating. I looked at the phone number on the note for a long time. Then I dialed it. It rang four times, each ring feeling slightly longer than the last, and then a robotic

voice informed me that the number I had reached was no longer in service. I put the phone down on the kitchen floor beside me. My mother called at eight forty-five, which was late for her — she went to bed early

now, in the ground-floor bedroom of the house in Oak Park where I had grown up, the

bedroom that had been her and my father's and was now just hers, where she slept

with the television on low because the quiet had become too loud after he died. She

had been diagnosed with early-stage lupus eighteen months ago, which had

announced itself gradually and then all at once in the way of illnesses that have been

patient. The diagnosis itself was manageable — with treatment, with consistency, with the particular medication regimen that her rheumatologist in Evanston had

assembled and which cost, without the partial insurance coverage that my mother's

retirement plan provided, an amount that did not bear stating in full. "How was the first day?" she asked. Her voice had the quality it always had when she

was asking something she genuinely wanted the full answer to — warm and open and

faintly anticipatory, the voice of a woman who had been an elementary school

librarian for twenty-six years and had maintained, through everything, the sincere

conviction that other people's stories were worth attending to. "Good," I said. I was on the couch by then, feet tucked under me, the note folded back

up on the coffee table where I could see it. "He's interesting."

"The boss?"

"Cole Whitmore. Yes." A small pause. "Interesting how?" I considered the question honestly, which was what my mother always demanded —

not a performance of fine, not a reassuring summary, but an actual attempt at accuracy. "Smart in a way that makes you want to prove you're smart too," I said. "Demanding. Efficient. I don't think he wastes anything — not time, not words, not attention." I

paused. "He noticed things I didn't expect him to notice." My mother made a small sound that I had catalogued over twenty-six years as her

version of tell me more. "He knew how long it had taken me to find the discrepancy in a report," I said. "I

hadn't told anyone. I don't know how he knew."

"That could be impressive," she said. "Or it could be something else."

"I know." We talked for twenty minutes about small things — the garden, the book club she

attended on Thursdays, a neighbor's dog that had developed an affectionate fixation

with her front porch. I did not tell her about the note. I had been protecting her from

my worries in the aggregate way of people who love someone and know their love is

load-bearing — if she worried about me, it cost her, and she had enough costs already. This was a thing I had been doing since my father's heart attack six years ago, this

quiet restructuring of what I shared, and I had become so practiced at it that it no

longer felt like deception. It felt like maintenance. Like making sure the foundation

held. After she hung up I made tea because that was the thing Beth would have done and I

missed Beth tonight in the specific way you miss people who have known you long

enough to anticipate what you need. I took the tea to bed and lay in the dark and

stared at the ceiling and thought about Sasha Reeves. Let me tell you what I was, before any of this. I was a journalist by training and a realist by necessity. I had graduated from

Columbia's School of Journalism at twenty-two with a master's degree and a thesis on

the erosion of local news infrastructure in Midwestern cities, which had won a

departmental prize and which approximately forty people had read. I had come back

to Chicago because my mother was here and because Chicago had made me and

because I had never quite believed in the version of myself that existed only in New

York. I had gotten a staff position at the Chicago Tribune's business desk at twenty-

three, which had been everything I had worked toward and which had turned out to be, in the practical experience of it, an education in the distance between what journalism

was supposed to be and what the economics of journalism had made it. I had been good at it regardless. I was good at most things I decided to be good at, which was not arrogance so much as a pattern I had observed about myself with the

same detachment I brought to everything — I identified what a thing required, and I

provided it, and the results followed. I had broken two stories in my first year that the editors had not expected from someone that new. I had a source network that older

reporters had taken years to build and which I had assembled in eighteen months by

being genuinely interested in the people I spoke to, which turned out to be a rarer

quality in a newsroom than you might expect. Then Daniel had happened, and the Tribune had happened, and I had left both at

roughly the same time, which was a coincidence that I allowed myself to believe was

a coincidence because the alternative — that I had let a man's departure rearrange the

geography of my professional life — was not a narrative I was willing to inhabit. Daniel Cho had been my editor. This was, in retrospect, the foundational error, but it

had not felt like an error at twenty-four when he had been brilliant and attentive and

had read my work with the kind of careful respect that can feel, when you are young

and ambitious, indistinguishable from love. We had been together for two years. We

had been engaged for nine months. He had ended it on a Wednesday in February with

the gentleness of someone who had been rehearsing the conversation long enough to

have removed most of the rough edges, which was in some ways worse than anger

would have been — the smoothness of it, the sense of careful premeditation, made it

clear that I had not had access to the version of him that made decisions. I had left the Tribune three months later, not because of Daniel but because of the

reason Daniel had given, which was that he did not think I was fully present in my life, and which had made me angry enough that I spent those three months looking at

myself with a brutal and unsentimental eye and concluding, with the awful clarity of

someone conducting an honest inventory, that he was not entirely wrong. I had been

pursuing the idea of a life more passionately than the actual one. I had been

performing competence and deflecting intimacy and calling it professionalism, and I

was twenty-five and my father was dead and my mother was sick and I had been

engaged to a man for nine months who knew me well enough to articulate the gap

between who I was and who I was pretending to be. I had gone to Meridian Consulting because it paid better and because I needed to

prove to myself that I could succeed somewhere that had not been built, in some

structural sense, around my particular gifts. I had lasted fourteen months. The work

was not wrong for me — analysis, research, the architecture of argument — but the

culture was, and I had not been able to manufacture the performance of enthusiasm

for work that ultimately served only the accumulation of other people's money. And then Donna had called with her rare and exceptional opportunity, and my

mother's bills were on the counter, and here I was. Twenty-six years old. Smart, broke, careful, alone. In a job I needed, beside a man I

had been warned about, with a phone number that no longer existed and a name I

could not find and a question I could not yet bring myself to fully form.