A StrangerWith Answers
1087 Words
She sat on the edge of her bed in the dark and let herself feel all of it, the humiliation
and the anger and the particular ache of being completely wrong about someone she had
believed in, and when she had felt enough she lay down and stared at the ceiling
Lila's words kept returning, not the cruelty of them but that last part, because I was
asked to, said so easily, as though destroying someone's livelihood was an unremarkable
errand, as though Ella was not a person but a task assigned and completed
Someone had sent Lila
Someone had chosen Ella specifically, watched her, decided she was the right target, and
sent someone in to get close and pull everything apart once it was built
She lay there and turned that over until it felt less like paranoia and more like arithmetic
Her phone buzzed on the nightstandShe ignored it
It buzzed again and she picked it up, an unknown number, five words: we have a job
offer
She stared at it for a long time, then put it face down and went to sleep because she had
nothing left for this tonight
Morning arrived and she lay still and counted her situation, no job, almost no savings,
rent due at the end of the week, starting from nothing again
She thought about Lila saying because I was asked to
She got up, got dressed, and went outside
The streets were full and she moved through them without a plan, she had done this
before, she knew how to walk without a destination and look like she had one, and the
city looked different to her now, she had been here long enough that it wasn't unfamiliar
anymore, she knew which streets ran where, where the good market was, where the
coffee was cheap, which parts of the pavement flooded when it rained
She had built a life here
Someone had decided it needed to come apart
She was still turning that over when the black car appeared beside her, moving slowly,
keeping pace
She ignored it
"Miss"
She kept walking
"I'm not here for whatever you're thinking" the driver said through the open window
She stopped and looked at him, well dressed, calm, somewhere in his forties, he looked
back at her with the expression of someone who has already made his assessment and is
waiting for her to catch up
"What do you want" she said
"To offer you a job"
"You don't know me"
"More than you'd think" he said "get in"
Every reasonable part of her said no, she had a list of good reasons, she had very recent
evidence that people who approached her with offers were not what they appeared, and
yet Lila had said because I was asked to and this man had appeared the morning afterShe got in
He pulled into traffic smoothly and neither of them spoke for a moment
"My employers have been watching you" he said "your background, where you came
from, the last several months here, where you are now"
"That's unsettling"
"Probably" he said, not apologising for it "we've been watching since before you arrived
in this city actually"
"Why"
"Because of who you're connected to" he said "and what that connection makes
possible"
"What do you need done"
"Undercover work" he said "inside a company called Harlow Group, we need someone
on the inside who can move quietly and find something buried for a very long time"
"And you think I'm that person"
"I know you are"
"You keep saying things like that but I don't know your name, I don't know who your
employers are, I know nothing"
"Fair" he said "my name is Adrian, my employers have spent years trying to find out
what Harlow Group is hiding and have run out of conventional ways to look, and as for
you" he paused "I know you finished a degree while working two jobs to pay for it, I
know you left your city with almost nothing and built something here with your own
hands, and I know someone was paid to take it apart last night because you were getting
too settled and that was inconvenient for certain people"
The car felt very still
"Lila" she said
"Was employed, yes"
"By Harlow Group"
"By someone connected to them"
Ella turned to look at him "so they already know who I am"
"They know you exist" he said "they don't know what you're capable of, and they don't
know what you know about someone inside that building""Who is inside that building"
He glanced at her briefly and then back at the road "when the time is right"
At a red light he reached into the console and handed her an envelope, she opened it and
the money inside was more than she had held in a very long time, more than two
months of her shop wage
"That's less than half" he said "the rest when the job begins"
"What exactly is the job"
"You go in as an employee, we arrange it, you do the work well, earn trust, and while
you're doing that you watch and listen and look for evidence of what we know is there"
"What do you know is there"
"Records" he said "financial records, correspondence, documents showing a pattern of
decisions that have hurt a very large number of people, deliberately made and carefully
covered, we have pieces but not enough, we need someone inside to find the rest"
"Why me specifically, there must be people who do this professionally"
"There are" he said "and they've been noticed, Harlow Group watches their staff closely,
anyone who comes in looking for something gets quietly removed, but you have a reason
to be close to someone inside that building with no connection to the job, and that gives
you access nobody else can create"
"You keep mentioning this connection without telling me what it is"
"Because I need you to say yes first"
She looked out the window and thought about the room with cracked walls she wouldn't
be able to pay for at the end of the week, about Lila's smile, about because I was asked
to, about the fact that someone had been watching her long enough to send a person in
to dismantle her life on purpose
She was not going to be managed
"Alright" she said
Adrian glanced at her "your life changes tonight, are you sure"
"Yes" she said, and she was
- Writer
