The Quiet Conversation

Deacon Wexler's office smells like new carpet and old cologne, and he'd rearranged the visitor chair so it sat slightly lower than his — a trick I'd watched him use on other people for a decade without ever once suspecting I'd be sitting in it myself.

"This is just a check-in," he said, sliding a manila folder across the desk without opening it. "Nothing formal yet."

Yet.

"Deacon, I've worked here twenty-two years. I've never had a single write-up."

"Things change." He said it gently, the way you'd tell someone their dog needs to be put down. "There have been... concerns raised. About tone. Responsiveness."

"By whom?"

"You know I can't share that."

I thought of Grover Ellison, fourteen months in the ground, apparently still filing HR complaints from beyond it. I said nothing. I have gotten very good, this past week, at saying nothing.

"I just want to be fair to you," Deacon went on. "Get ahead of it. Maybe we look at a transition package. Something generous, given your tenure."

Generous. Six weeks before my pension fully vested, and he wanted to hand me a transition package instead, dressed up in language soft enough to sound like a kindness.

"I'll think about it," I said, standing before he could stop me.

He stood too, blocking the doorway just slightly, close enough that I caught the old-cologne smell again. "Corinne. For what it's worth — I think you've been a real asset here."

Past tense. He'd already filed me under finished.

I made it to the elevator before my hands started shaking again. I pressed the button for the ninth floor, needing air, needing Priya, needing anyone who still spoke to me like I existed in the present tense.

The doors were sliding shut when I heard Deacon's voice drift out from his open office door, pitched low into his phone, clearly meant for no one's ears but his own:

"...yeah, he wants it wrapped before the board meeting Friday. Says it has to be clean by then."

The elevator doors closed on the rest of the sentence.