Chapter 4: WITHOUT WORDS
1169 Words
I CAME BACK.
I told myself it was because I had no other option. Four years of work and a dead father and a fraudulent contract sitting on a table with his signature on it. I told myself walking away was not something I was built for.
I didn't tell myself about the photograph.
I put it in the inside pocket of my bag where I wouldn't have to look at it and I came back on Friday morning and sat down at the work table and opened the next folder in the sequence and got to work.
Aiden didn't come down that day. Or the day after.
By the ninth day I had stopped tracking the footsteps overhead.
The second time I stayed late it was on purpose. The cross-referencing was slow and the window near the ceiling had gone dark by the time I looked up and I decided another hour wouldn't hurt. I was on my toes reaching for a folder on the top shelf when he walked in. My fingers were just catching the edge of it when he reached over my shoulder and pulled it down.
He was right behind me.
Neither of us moved.
Then he held the folder out and I took it and said thank you to the shelf in front of me and he stepped back and said "use the step next time" and I said "I had it" and he didn't argue.
He pulled out the chair across from mine and sat down and opened a file and we worked like that across from each other without talking. No explanation for why he was there. No acknowledgment of the night before or the archive or any of it. Just two people working and the sound of pages turning and I was more comfortable than I had been in nine days inside that building and I didn't know what to do with that.
After a while he said "you haven't eaten."
I looked up. "What."
"This morning. You said you skipped breakfast. It's six thirty."
I had said that. To Clara on the stairs. I hadn't thought anyone heard me.
"I'm fine," I said and went back to work.
Twenty minutes later footsteps on the stairs and a bag appeared on the top step. Containers from the place two streets over, the one I had looked at through the window on my lunch break and decided was too expensive.
I brought the bag down and sat across from him and opened it.
He didn't look up from his file.
I pushed one of the containers across the table.
He looked at it. Then at me.
"I ordered enough for two," I said and went back to my folder.
He opened the container. We ate across from each other with our folders open between us and I kept my eyes on my work and told myself this was nothing. Two people eating. That was all.
Then he said "your father worked here every day for eleven years."
I looked up.
"Edmund mentioned him once. Years ago." He turned a page without looking at me. "Said he was the most stubborn man he had ever done business with."
"He was," I said.
"He meant it as a complaint."
"I know." I looked back down at my folder. "My father would have taken it as a compliment."
Aiden almost smiled. I saw it happen and then stop happening and I looked back down at my work before he caught me noticing.
We finished eating and went back to work and neither of us mentioned it again. An hour passed. Then another. At some point he got up and came back with two cups of coffee and put one next to me without saying anything and I picked it up without saying anything and we kept working.
I didn't mean to fall asleep.
I woke up to his jacket across my shoulders and a glass of water on the table that wasn't there before. The archive was cold and the window near the ceiling was black and I had no idea how long I had been out.
I packed my things and went upstairs. Front door locked. Side door locked. I went up one more floor and pushed open the first door I found.
Aiden was at his desk. Jacket gone, sleeves rolled, working like it was the middle of the day.
He looked up.
"You locked me in," I said.
"The building locks automatically at eight."
"You knew I was still down there."
He said nothing.
"Aiden." I walked to his desk and put both hands flat on it. "Why did you stay."
He looked at my hands on his desk. Then at my face. Then he sat back.
"You came into this building with a plan," he said. "Four years of it. You knew exactly what you wanted and exactly how to get it and you walked in here and executed it without flinching. I've sat across from lawyers and investors and people who have been doing this for thirty years and not one of them has ever done that."
I said nothing.
"You pushed a container of food across the table at me tonight like it was nothing," he said. "Like we were just two people eating. Like none of this was complicated." He looked at me. "Nobody does that either."
"Aiden—"
"I stayed because I didn't want to go home," he said. Just like that. No dressing it up. "That hasn't happened before."
I looked at him for a long time.
The photograph was in my bag. Six inches from where my hands were flat on his desk. I had spent nine days sitting across from this man and eating food he ordered and wearing his jacket and I still didn't know if he was the one who put it there.
I wanted to ask him.
I didn't.
"This isn't just about my father's documents anymore is it," I said.
He said nothing. But he didn't look away.
I left his jacket on the desk and walked out. The driver was already waiting outside. I didn't ask how he knew.
I got in the car and took the photograph out of my bag and looked at it the whole ride home.
You found the wrong thing.
Nine days and I still didn't know what the right thing was.
But when I got home there was a second photograph wedged under my front door.
Someone traced my house address and dropped the photograph there.
It was the same print and plain paper but it wasn't taken in the archive.
Someone took my address from my application letter and traced me home, I'm being monitored when I'm yet to execute my plans.
I turned the back of the photograph and there was a written text that read
"Your father did everything you're trying to do no
w but he lost it, if you don't play smart you'll loose it all".
- Writer
