1986
I started at Fenwick & Voss in September of 1986, twenty-six years old, wearing a blazer with shoulder pads sharp enough to cut bread, terrified of the electric typewriter on my new desk.
Harlan Voss was thirty-four then, the golden boy of the litigation floor, six years from making name partner. He came by my desk on my second day with a box of chocolates and a smile that every woman in that office had already warned me about in the elevator, in the bathroom, in whispered asides by the coffee machine.
"You'll be the best thing that's happened to this floor," he told me, setting the box down like a king bestowing a favor.
"That's kind of you," I said, and didn't open it until he'd walked away.
I want to say I understood immediately what I was looking at. I didn't. I was twenty-six and new and grateful for the job, and it took me four months to understand that the warnings in the elevator weren't gossip — they were a map, drawn by women who couldn't say the words out loud but could still tell you where the danger was if you knew how to read the shape of their silence.
The map had a name on it before I'd even learned to read it properly: Renata, one of the junior secretaries on the fourteenth floor. I knew her only from the directory and from the sound of her laugh through the wall between our departments — bright, unbothered, the kind of laugh that made you want to know the joke.
In November, that wall went quiet.
By December, her name was gone from the directory, a neat black line drawn through it by someone in Payroll who never explained why, and when I asked Personnel where she'd transferred to, the woman behind the desk looked at me the way you look at someone standing too close to a hole in the ice.
"She didn't transfer," she said. "She resigned. Effective immediately. No notice period, no exit interview, no forwarding address on file."
"That's strange," I said.
"That's the third one this year," she said, and then, like she'd said too much already, went back to her filing and wouldn't look up again.