The Folder

I didn't sleep for three nights after that index card. I want you to understand what a message like that does to a twenty-nine-year-old woman in 1989, with no HR department worth the name, no policy on his desk that used the word "harassment," nothing but a filing cabinet's worth of instinct telling her she'd just been caught.

But back at the party — forty years later, three glasses of bad champagne into my own retirement — Priya Nandan found me again by the elevator bank, away from the noise.

"You said midnight," she said. "It's not midnight yet, but I need to ask you something now, and I need a real answer."

"All right."

"There's a folder," she said. "I've heard about it for two years. Nobody in this building will say what's in it out loud, but three different women have told me, separately, unprompted, that if anything ever happened to them here, I should ask Doris about the folder."

I looked at her for a long moment. Forty years of practice keeping my face still, and it still cost me something to keep it that way now.

"There isn't a folder," I said.

Her shoulders dropped, half relief, half something closer to disappointment.

"There are eleven," I said. "One for every five years I worked here. They're not in this building. They haven't been in this building since 1994."

"Doris—"

"And as of nine o'clock this morning," I said, checking my watch, "they're not just mine anymore."

Behind her, across the room, Harlan Voss was laughing at something Gerald Fenwick had said, his hand resting on the back of a chair two feet from where Talia Bloom stood, and I watched his eyes find mine over Priya's shoulder like he already knew exactly what we were talking about.