"No Subject"

Chapter Two: The Weight of Not Replying

The email stayed open in a tab she kept minimising and reopening.

By eleven o'clock she had minimised it seven times. She knew because she had started counting after the fourth, which was the point at which she acknowledged to herself that she was counting.

At her workstation, the ambient noise of the marketing department moved around her like water around a stone — keyboards, laughter, the particular percussion of Abiodun from accounts printing something on the machine that was slowly dying next to the copier. Normal things. Measurable things.

She was not looking at the email.

She was not not looking at the email either.

"Adaeze." Her team lead, Funmi, appeared at the edge of her cubicle. Mid-forties, the kind of efficient that other people mistook for cold. "The Halcyon deck needs your numbers before the two o'clock."

"They're ready," Adaeze said. "I'll send them by twelve."

Funmi nodded once and left. This was the entirety of their relationship, and Adaeze had always found it deeply satisfying.

She looked at the email.

You still didn't tell me why.

She thought about typing something professional. I'm not sure this line of communication is appropriate. She thought about typing something dismissive. I don't know what you're referring to. She thought about not typing anything at all, which was what she had been doing, and which was beginning to feel less like a decision and more like a habit she had accidentally started.

The problem — the specific, inconvenient, professionally inadvisable problem — was that she knew exactly why she made herself invisible.

She had simply never said it to anyone out loud.

He was at the coffee machine at half past twelve.

She saw him before he saw her, which gave her approximately three seconds to decide whether to turn around and go back to her desk. She kept walking. She was not someone who turned around. She had decided this about herself at seventeen and had not revisited it since.

He stepped aside to let her reach the machine.

"Good afternoon," he said.

"Good afternoon," she said.

She focused on the coffee. The machine was slow and made a sound like it was personally offended by the request, and she stood and listened to it and told herself she was completely comfortable with this silence.

"You read it," he said.

"I read everything that comes to my inbox."

"And?"

"And I processed it and moved on." She picked up her cup. "As one does with work correspondence."

He was quiet for a moment. When she glanced at him, he was watching her with something that was almost amusement but softer than that — more like recognition.

"I'll delete it," he said, "if you'd like. It was out of line."

"I didn't say that."

"No," he said. "You didn't."

She walked away, and this time she did not look back.

She also did not tell him to delete it.

There is a particular kind of knowing that arrives not as a thought but as a rearrangement. Like furniture being moved in a house while you're asleep — you wake up and nothing is where it was, and you cannot explain precisely when it changed.

Adaeze went back to her desk, ate her lunch without tasting it, and sent Funmi the numbers with four minutes to spare.

At two forty-seven, an envelope icon appeared in the corner of her screen.

From: K. Obi To: A. Nwosu Subject: (no subject)

You said "I didn't say that." That is not the same as "don't." I am noting this distinction in the interest of transparency.

She stared at the email for a long time.

She was not smiling.

She was very deliberately not smiling.

She typed: You're reading a great deal into a single sentence.

She deleted it.

She typed: This is not an appropriate use of the internal mail system.

She deleted that too.

She sat back in her chair and looked at the ceiling and thought about a woman she used to know — her secondary school English teacher, Mrs. Okonkwo — who had told her once: The things we refuse to say out loud are the ones that own us, Adaeze. Not the other way around.

She opened a reply window.

She typed a single line.

She stared at it for so long that the screen saver nearly activated.

Then she pressed send.

Because invisible things don't get broken.

She closed the tab, put on her headphones, and opened the Halcyon deck.

The envelope icon appeared four minutes later.

She did not open it until she was in the car going home, when the day had closed around her and the city was loud with people who were also, in their own ways, making themselves small.

It said:

I see you, Adaeze Nwosu. That's the problem, isn't it.

No question mark. He had written it as a statement.

She sat with the phone in her lap long after the driver had pulled into her street, and she thought about the amber light in the elevator, and the floor humming, and the particular quality of attention that feels nothing like being watched and everything like being found.

She typed back: Goodnight, Mr. Obi.

His reply came in eight seconds.

Goodnight, Adaeze.

Just her name. No title. No modifier.

She went inside.

The next morning, she arrived at seven fourteen.

Old habit.

She was at the coffee machine when she heard the elevator open behind her. She did not look up.

But she did notice — in the particular way that people notice things they are pretending not to — that she was no longer sure whether she was staying invisible out of preference, or out of something else entirely. Something that had no clean name yet and sat in her chest like the pause between a question and an answer.

She poured her coffee.

She went to her desk.

She did not check her inbox for six entire minutes.

For her, this was practically nothing.

For her, this was everything.