Chapter 314: Raymond Reed
Janet had not meant to stay late at the office.
She had told herself, at half past five, that she would finish only the Marchetti project and then go home.
The Marchetti project had led, in the way of files, to the account correspondence, which had led to a cross-reference, which had led her to a box of archived employee records that someone had misfiled under the wrong year and which she had been meaning to sort for six weeks.
Now it was nearly eight, and the office was empty, and Janet was sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by folders, her jacket over the back of her chair and her reading glasses on, because she was thirty and she had stopped pretending about the reading glasses.
She picked up the next folder.
Reed, Raymond. Contract Employee, 2019-2021. She stopped. She looked at the name. Raymond.
She said it quietly to herself, not quite aloud, the way you say the name of someone you haven’t thought about in a while and are surprised to find still lodged somewhere in you.
She turned the folder over in her hands. The photograph in the upper corner of the intake form, she found herself studying it, really studying it, in the way she had not when he had simply been an employee. A colleague. Present.
He was smiling in the photo. The closed-mouth kind of smile that meant I am performing the act of smiling for an ID photograph rather than any actual happiness, but underneath it, something else, something in the set of the jaw, in the eyes. A man carrying something sideways.
He disappeared without a trace, she thought.
There had been no resignation. No notice. No farewell. One day, Raymond Reed had been here, and the next day he had simply stopped being here, and no one had pressed very hard on it because he had been contract, because things had been complicated that year, because...
She looked at the mobile number in the contact field. She reached for her own phone and dialled it before she had decided to.
Three tones. Then a recorded voice, brisk and impersonal: This number is not in service. She lowered the phone.
She sat on the floor with the folder on her knees for a moment. Then she made a decision, the way Janet usually made decisions, completely, without much visible internal drama, as if the deciding had been happening below the surface for longer than the moment of it.
She photographed the number and sent it to Marcus in the tech team with a message that said, Can you run this number? Find out what you can about current registration. No rush, tomorrow is fine. Thanks.
Marcus replied in four minutes because Marcus had no concept of office hours, on it
She closed the folder, put it in the correct box, and went home.
By ten the next morning, she had her answer. She was standing at the coffee machine when her phone buzzed.
Number deregistered in 2022. Sebastian Creed. Janet looked at the message for a very long time.
Then she looked out the window. Sebastian Creed.
She turned the name over. She put it next to the face in the photograph. She put it next to everything she had heard over the past three years, the things said and the things carefully not said, the gaps in Amara that she had learned to read the same way you learn to read someone you love, by their silences as much as their speech.
Raymond, she thought. Raymond was Seb.
She thought about the way Amara had talked about Raymond in the beginning, when they first hired him, there’s something familiar about him, I can’t place it, probably nothing and then had never mentioned it again.
She thought about the day Raymond stopped coming in and how Amara had gone quiet for a week and how Janet had assumed it was the pregnancy situation, which was its own separate catastrophe that year.
She thought about Seren. She pressed her knuckle against her bottom lip. She went to Amara’s office and knocked.
"Come in."
Amara was at her desk. She had a pen in her hand and three folders open in front of her, and the particular look on her face of someone who has been working for two hours and has reached the part of the work that requires something she has temporarily misplaced.
Janet closed the door behind her.
Amara looked up. She read Janet’s face the way Janet had learned to read hers, quickly, accurately, with attention to the things the face was trying not to say.
She put the pen down.
"What," she said. Not alarmed. Just precise.
"Raymond Reed," Janet said.
A pause. Small. Almost invisible.
"What about him?" Amara said.
"His contact number." Janet held out her phone. "I was going through old employee records last night. Something made me run it through tech."
Amara took the phone. She read the screen. She read it again.
Janet watched her. Watched the stillness that moved through her like weather, not a performance of stillness but the real kind, the kind that comes when a body is absorbing something and needs every resource it has for that task alone.
Amara set the phone on the desk. She sat back in her chair.
"Sebastian Creed," she said. Her voice was level. A woman who had stitched herself back together carefully and knew every seam.
"Yes," Janet said quietly.
"He was... " She stopped. She looked at the wall for a moment. Then she gave a short, single laugh that was not a laugh, the kind of sound that comes out when what you feel is too complicated for any better expression. "Of course he was."
"Amara... "
"No." She shook her head. Not sharply. Not in distress. Something steadier than that. She picked up her pen again and then set it down again, because the pen was not what she needed, but she needed to do something with her hands.
"No. I mean, that explains things. It explains the familiarity. It explains why I always felt, " She stopped again. She was quiet for a moment. "It doesn’t matter anything, good thing he left himself so I didn’t have to drag him out."
Janet sat down in the client’s chair without being invited, because she had known Amara for six years, and some protocols had long dissolved between them.
"You don’t have to decide what it matter right now," Janet said.
"I’m not going to decide anything," Amara said calmly.
Comments