What Loyalty Was Worth

I didn't sleep that night at all. I sat in my kitchen with Priya until three in the morning, running through what could be in that office worth walking into at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday.

My rolodex of every vendor password I'd ever needed. My desk drawer, where — foolishly, I realized now — I still kept a paper printout of that folded access log Priya had first handed me in the stairwell.

"You need to get everything digital," Priya said. "Tonight. Scanned, backed up somewhere he can't touch — not the company cloud, not your work email."

I thought about why any of this mattered so much to me, beyond the obvious. My husband Walt had died three years ago, quick and cruel, a heart that gave out on a Tuesday morning while he was making coffee. We'd never had children. What we'd had was a plan — modest, unglamorous, entirely dependent on the pension I'd earned by staying loyal to a company that, it turned out, had never once been loyal back.

Twenty-two years. I had given this place my whole adult life on the theory that loyalty meant something, that it was a kind of insurance against exactly this. I'd watched younger employees jump from company to company chasing bigger titles, and I'd told myself, smugly, that I understood something they didn't. Stability. Commitment. It goes both ways.

It had never gone both ways. It had simply gone.

At four in the morning, badge or no badge, I drove back to the office. Priya came with me, her old campus ID from grad school still miraculously granting her building access through a side door nobody had ever bothered to update.

My office looked untouched. Almost too untouched — my rolodex squared perfectly to the desk edge, when I always left it angled toward my chair.

I opened the bottom drawer where I'd hidden the folded printout inside an old greeting card.

The card was there. The printout was gone.