Don't Use My Name
Odalys Kerrigan was easy enough to find — she worked in analytics at a logistics company across town now, her profile photo warm and unguarded, nothing like the tense signature on that scanned page. Naomi drafted six versions of a message before sending the shortest one: I think something happened to you that's happening to me now. Would you be willing to talk?
She didn't expect an answer. People who signed non-disparagement clauses learned to stay quiet the hard way.
The reply came at midnight, three words long.
Don't use my name.
Then, a minute later, a second message: Delete this thread when you're done. Please.
Naomi sat with her phone in the dark for a long time. Fear like that wasn't reflexive. It was trained.
The next morning she went in early, wanting to think before the office filled up, and Graham was already at her desk — not unusual, he did his rounds most mornings, coffee in hand, checking in on everyone like a genial mayor.
"Rough night?" he said. "You look wiped."
"Just prepping some numbers."
"For Cascade?" He smiled, easy as ever. "I keep meaning to ask — did you ever loop in that analyst friend of yours in logistics? What's her name, the one you were chatting with online last night. Might be a good use case for the dashboard, actually, retail-adjacent."
Naomi's stomach dropped somewhere around her shoes.
She had told exactly one person about messaging Odalys. Foster. In a hallway, in a whisper, at nine o'clock the night before, nowhere near a shared calendar or an open laptop.
Nobody had known about that conversation except the two of them.
Nobody except, apparently, Graham.
"Just an old contact," she said, keeping her voice light, feeling her pulse in her ears. "Nothing interesting."
"Course," Graham said, already turning to go, still smiling. "Let me know if you need an intro to anyone. I know a lot of people."
He walked off whistling.
Naomi sat very still, and understood, with a cold clarity that had nothing to do with the coffee she hadn't finished, that someone was telling him things.