A Name I Know

I stepped back from the crowd, glass abandoned on the nearest table, and found the stairwell before I found my breath.

October ninth. I could recite that date the way other people recite their own birthdays, because my father used to circle it in red pen on our kitchen calendar every single year, right up until the year he stopped circling anything at all.

My phone was already in my hand. Mom. Call me. It's important.

Three dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again.

"Priya? What's wrong?" My mother's voice came through tight, the way it always got when she thought something had happened to me.

"Nothing's wrong, I just—" I pressed my back against the cold stairwell wall. "The founder of my company. Gerald Thorne. He just told a story at the holiday party. Two hundred dollars, a folding table, a garage. October ninth."

Silence on the line. Real silence, the kind that has weight.

"Mom?"

"Where did you hear that?" Her voice had changed completely.

"He said it. Tonight. Like it was his."

"That's your father's story." She said it flatly, like a fact she'd been holding for twenty years, waiting for someone to finally ask. "That's exactly your father's story, Priya. Word for word."

The stairwell door banged open below me. Callum Whitmore came up two steps at a time, glasses fogged from the cold outside, a paper plate of cookies balanced in one hand.

"There you are, I was—" He stopped. "Hey. You okay? You look like you saw a ghost."

"I think I did," I said, and I hung up on my own mother mid-sentence, which I never do, because Gerald Thorne's laugh had drifted up the stairwell after us, easy and warm and completely unbothered, and something about the sound of it made my stomach turn over.

"Callum," I said. "I need you to help me find something. Tonight."

"Find what?"

"My dad's old boxes. The ones in my mom's garage. I think our founder just stole his whole life story — and if he stole the story, I need to know what else he took."