File Number 4471
Naomi drove to her father's house for the first time in six years, and the porch light was already on, like he'd been sitting by the window.
Gerald opened the door before she knocked. He looked smaller than the man in her memory — grayer, softer around the shoulders — and for a second neither of them said anything useful.
"You look like your mother," he said finally.
"You look tired."
It wasn't warmth, exactly. It was a truce.
Inside, his kitchen table was already covered in paperwork he'd apparently pulled together in case she came: pay stubs, his original offer letter from 1996, a laminated thirty-year service award with his photo on it, younger, dark-haired, grinning like the future was a sure thing.
"File number," she said. "Do you know it?"
He didn't have to look. "4471. Why?"
She didn't answer that yet. Instead she spread his last three pay stubs across the table and started photographing them with her phone, the way she'd done a hundred times with other people's evidence, except her hands weren't steady the way they usually were.
"Naomi." He waited until she looked up. "I know I don't get to ask for anything from you. I know that. But whatever this is — whatever you're building — I don't want it to be about me and you. I want it to be about what they did. To all of us."
"All of us?"
"There's a whole shift that came up through the plant with me. Denny. And there was a woman on second shift, retired two years back, same story. Cut nine days short."
Naomi's stomach turned. Two years back. She'd covered a wrongful-termination suit two years ago that had gone nowhere for lack of a pattern — one plaintiff, easily painted as a disgruntled employee, case dismissed. She hadn't thought about it since.
She opened her old reporting archive on her phone, scrolled to the piece she'd filed and mostly forgotten, and there it was — a name typed in her own handwriting eighteen months before she had any idea her own father would end up on the same list.
Frances Adeyemi. Same plant. Same nine days short.