New York,
Katrine,
United States
The next morning, I lay in the dark long after my alarm had gone off. The ceiling was white, neutral, offering nothing. But my brain had already been at work for hours.
If I were him, where would I start?
The answer came effortlessly, almost boring in its logic.
The pizzeria.
The pizzeria had my full name on the employment contract. It had my phone number, my address — Arabelle's address, which was even worse. It knew my schedule, my usual routes, the color and license plate of the scooter I rode. Elie had watched me walk in that night in a state of shock. A man methodical enough to make a body disappear in a forest would have no difficulty tracing his way back to an employee register.
I got up.
I arrived at the pizzeria at nine, before opening. Elie was already there, of course, he was always there before everyone else, one of his most consistent and least commented-upon traits. He looked up from his order slips when he saw me come in.
—You're not supposed to be in today.
—I know. I need to talk to you.
He put down his pen. That simple gesture — setting down the pen, looking up — was his way of saying I'm listening without saying it. I settled onto a stool on the other side of the counter and took a second to calibrate my lie.
—I'm quitting.
Silence.
—You're joking.
—No.
—You've been here two months.
—I can count.
He sighed and pushed his ponytail back over his shoulder.
—This is about the other night.
It wasn't a question. I fixed my gaze on the menu hanging on the wall. I'd figured he wasn't fooled.
—No, I finally said.
—You're a terrible liar.
—And you ask a lot of questions.
He crossed his arms.
—Did someone hurt you?
I looked up at him. The sincerity of his concern caught me slightly off guard.
But not enough to answer honestly.
—No.
He watched me with that expression I'd come to know — face slightly closed, the look of someone who doesn't believe what they're being told but is calculating whether it's worth pushing. I held his gaze without flinching.
It wasn't entirely false.
Nobody had hurt me. I had simply witnessed someone hurting others. A distinction. Elie understood he wouldn't get anything more.
—Have you already found something else?
—Maybe.
—Maybe?
—I have an interview next week.
—For what?
—Secretary.
A smile crossed his face.
—Honestly? That suits you better than delivery.
—Thank you. I think.
—It was a compliment.
—I still think.
For the first time in several days, he laughed. I felt an unexpected twinge. I liked this place. I liked the smell of fresh dough. I liked Gregory who was always shouting. I even liked the difficult customers.
But staying here meant leaving a glowing arrow behind me. Elie picked up his pen. Case closed — on the surface, at least.
—Good luck, then.
—Thank you for everything, Elie.
I left before he could reconsider his passivity. Out on the street, I took a different route than the day before.
★★★
The days that followed resembled a choreography I had designed alone and rehearsed in silence.
I never took the same route twice. In the morning I left through the side garden entrance rather than the main gate. I varied my departure times, sometimes seven, sometimes nine, never at a fixed hour. On busy commercial streets, my gaze moved automatically across shop windows, reading the reflections like a text in reverse: who was walking behind me, at what distance, for how long. I avoided alleyways, deserted parks at the end of the day, metro stairwells with no visible emergency exit.
It wasn't paranoia. It was precaution. The distinction mattered for my mental equilibrium.
Arabelle noticed nothing or pretended not to, which amounted to the same thing. I said nothing to her. Keeping her out of it wasn't distrust; it was protection. The less she knew, the less she became a variable in an equation whose terms I didn't yet fully understand.
In the evenings I would settle in with my laptop or my phone and search.
Man found dead, forest, New York.
Body discovered, suburbs, county.
Homicide, wooded area, last week.
Nothing.
Not a line. Not a notification. Not a two-sentence filler piece in a local paper. I widened my searches, Staten Island papers, Long Island papers, neighboring county bulletins. I scrolled through the social media feeds of local police departments, those institutional accounts that faithfully post missing persons notices and calls for witnesses.
Still nothing.
And that was the problem.
A body that vanishes without leaving a trace in the media isn't an oversight. It's a decision. Someone had erased not just the man, but the event itself as though that night had existed only for me.
I closed my laptop and stared into the darkness of my room for a long moment.
Did I actually see what I think I saw?
The answer, invariably, was yes. I had seen blood on dead leaves. I had heard a voice say I don't believe in second chances. I had met green eyes in the dark, a shade that belonged to no reasonable color chart.
I had seen. And someone had then taken great care that no one else would.
Should I act as though nothing happened?
★★★
Days passed, and I finally found myself standing in front of the More Group headquarters. I tilted my head back slowly. Then further. Then further still.
The building seemed to have been designed by someone who harbored a personal grudge against gravity.
A tower of glass and steel dominated the financial district like a modern lighthouse. Employees streamed in and out in a continuous current. Suits. Tailored jackets. Electronic badges. Expensive phones. The very air of the place smelled like money.
I checked the invitation email one more time.
More Enterprises.
Position: Administrative Secretary.
Interview: 2:00 PM.
I had no illusions.
Hundreds of candidates must have applied every year. More Enterprises was everywhere.
It was Arabelle who had mentioned the position, one evening over dinner, with the offhandedness of someone who raises a subject without quite measuring its weight.
—The firm I work with is looking for an executive secretary. Position at the More Enterprises headquarters. If you're interested... you're wildly overqualified, but at least you'd have some financial breathing room while you look for something better.
I had done my research that same night, as I always did my research. The More Group wasn't a company, it was an architecture. A sprawling conglomerate whose branches reached into commercial real estate, wealth management, institutional financial consulting, and several subsidiaries whose names meant nothing to the general public but whose annual balance sheets would have been enough to make certain governments uneasy.
The New York headquarters occupied the top fifteen floors of a Midtown tower. The director's name was Ashton Gray, thirty-one years old, Wharton graduate, a face that appeared regularly in the business supplements of major newspapers without ever giving an interview. The kind of profile that knows exactly how to remain visible without ever becoming readable.
The same applied to the owner. If the director kept a low profile, the chairman was practically invisible to the outside world. Only articles, no photographs, only anonymous interviews.
Arabelle's firm worked in direct collaboration with the group. Which meant, among other things, that she would potentially be operating in the same ecosystem as me if I got the position, a fact I noted without drawing any firm conclusions.
I walked in.
The entrance hall was a volume of glass and cold stone crossed by overhead light that gave the impression of being observed from above. The receptionist handed me a visitor's badge with the silent efficiency of someone trained not to smile unnecessarily.
Fifteenth floor. A corridor carpeted in charcoal grey. An assistant showed me into a corner office whose floor-to-ceiling windows framed Manhattan like a scale model.
Ashton Gray rose to greet me.
Early thirties, lean, in a dark suit cut with a precision that owed nothing to chance. A face of clean angles, a defined jaw, hazel eyes that assessed with a speed he took care to conceal behind flawless courtesy. He extended his hand.
—Miss Arzons. Please, sit down.
The interview lasted fifty minutes. It began with the expected questions — background, skills, reasons for leaving Montreal — and gradually shifted toward something more targeted. He wasn't looking for a secretary in the administrative sense. He was looking for someone capable of managing his strategic correspondence, filtering his contacts, reading a situation before it was put into words. A presence, more than a function.
—Your degree is in financial management, he observed, consulting my file. This position is below your qualifications. Why apply?
—Because a CEO's effectiveness depends less on his own abilities than on what someone else prevents him from having to deal with. I'm good at preventing.
He paused. Then, for the first time since the interview began, something that looked like genuine interest crossed his face.
The answer had pleased him. Not because it was flattering because it was true.
At the end of the interview, he extended his hand again.
—We'll be in touch within forty-eight hours.
I walked home. Evening was falling over Brooklyn with that autumnal slowness that turns streets into watercolor. Hands in my pockets, my mind still in that corner office, mechanically replaying the exchanges, searching for what I might have phrased differently.
I turned onto Arabelle's street.
And stopped.
In front of the gate, placed on the ground with an almost deliberate precision, sat a box. White, burgundy logo. The BonPizza logo, that spelling mistake I had found charming, a week ago.
I stood still for a few seconds, staring at it.
I hadn't ordered anything. Neither had Arabelle, she hated pizza. I looked left, then right. The street was quiet. A couple in the distance, backs to me. A car parked with its engine off. Nothing else.
I crouched down and lifted the lid.
The box was empty. Clean. No note. No message scrawled on the cardboard. No signature.
The box bore the order number from my last delivery. It was the exact same carton I had delivered to that manor , the receipt was still stapled to it, with the client's name.
Just emptiness, and silence, and a cold certainty that climbed slowly up my spine.
He knew where I lived.