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FORTY

“You’ve been gone awhile,” Jonathan says when she steps out of the elevator onto the forty-ninth floor.

“Aw, you missed me?” Alex says.

Jonathan sticks his tongue out. “No, but I was getting a little worried about you, honestly. Thought maybe you decided it all was too much and you bailed.”

“Not yet,” Alex says. She’d do anything at this point to prevent returning to her previous life. “Besides, I have a column due.”

“Good. We can’t lose two columnists in a year.” The joke lands between them heavier than he intends. Jonathan clears his throat uncomfortably. “Right.”

“Well, have a good afternoon. I’ll be in my office,” Alex says.

“Go get’em. I’ll be out here scheduling meetings if you need anything.”

Alex opens the door to her office. The sky outside is dark with an impending summer squall. She switches the desk lamp on. There is something comforting about the piles of letters waiting to be read. As she sits, anticipating the squeak of the chair, she realizes that for the first time ever the office feels like her own. She picks up the half-read letter from yesterday, the one from the person who was having trouble balancing the demands of their family with the desire to stop and take stock of what they need in life. Alex lets her mind relax and starts to write.

Dear Without a Compass,

It can be hard to find an anchor when you are constantly being tugged in different directions. Sometimes it feels like it will be easier on us to move along with the current, to take care of each person as their needs arise. But one day you will wake up and you will be far downstream without knowing exactly how you got there or even if you agreed to go in the first place. Sometimes what seems like the path of least resistance is actually the one that gets us into the most trouble. You need to be deliberate if you want to stay afloat.

When she is finally finished with her answer, the office is dark and shadowy. A bank of clouds presses in on the city; she watches them billowing in, enveloping whole buildings. There is something almost comforting about it, Alex thinks, her face next to the glass, something she likes about nature being in charge. The window goes gray. The rain finally hits, going from a light patter to a heavy squall in a matter of seconds. The buildings around the Herald are only fuzzy outlines through the rain. She’ll have to wait until the storm passes to leave for the night. She creeps out into the hall as a rattle of thunder shakes the building. She wonders how often lightning hits skyscrapers. They are basically giant tuning forks.

The newsroom is dark except for the emergency lights illuminating the exits. A crack of thunder and a gust of wind, and Alex swears she can feel the building shift around her. She stops in front of Howard’s office. The blinds are all the way up, the overhead light still on. His desk is uncharacteristically tidy, his chair spun to the side haphazardly from the last time he stood up. He has been going home early since Regina showed up and the ring mysteriously appeared back on his finger. A desperate ploy to save his marriage from collapse, it would seem.

She pushes her fingers against the door, half expecting it to be locked, but it swings easily inward. She glances back at the empty newsroom before she steps inside. The rain assails the outer window as she goes to stand behind his desk. Alex isn’t sure what she is looking for. A notecard perhaps, with a threatening memo. She stands in the stillness of the office and looks out over the city. The desk. This is where he brought the young girl he cheated on his wife with, Alex thinks, her stomach turning. She wonders what he promised these girls to convince them to sleep with him. Higher positions? Bylines? Or did he just tell them they were beautiful, irresistible in fact, and afterward that if they told anyone he would fire them?

A deafening crack of thunder comes from the other side of the building. She spins back toward the newsroom, and watches through the far bank of windows as lightning tears through the sky. How would she explain herself, barging into Howard Demetri’s office at 10 p.m.? If anyone were there to see what she was doing, she’d be out of a job immediately.

She isn’t sure what makes rummaging around in her boss’s desk worth the risk except for her aching need to finish what she has begun, to put something to rest that has been eating the Herald away from the inside. The death of Francis Keen. Alex won’t feel safe until she knows what happened.

She opens a desk drawer. She’s always seen Howard as someone orderly and meticulous, so she is shocked to find his things in chaos. A tangle of papers, books, pens without caps. What is she looking for?

She slides the drawers open one at a time, pulling out crimped pages of articles about Russia, the presidential primaries, scrawled lists of potential op-eds. In her days of research, she’d read somewhere that Howard still did all of his edits by hand. She looks at his scrawled penciled notes in the margins of a piece about an oil pipeline expansion and is amazed he is able to read them.

As Alex pulls open the bottom drawer, something clinks far back behind a row of file folders. She pulls the folders forward, and three empty whiskey bottles fall over into the bottom of the drawer. So, that time she saw him in the hall wasn’t a one-off. Alex’s heart sinks. She wonders what Howard is trying to numb. She closes that drawer and slides open the last, a narrow drawer that stretches along the top of the desk.

Pushed into the back corner she finds a flat piece of leather. Alex pulls it forward and picks it up. It’s heavy. A fold of leather with an inscription embossed in gold along the edge. She turns it over to read it.

For Howard, to keep you sharp.

As she turns it over, putting her finger into the stiff loop, she realizes she is looking at a sheath. Her hands tremble. Where is the knife? She opens the drawer farther, looking for the glint of a blade deeper in the drawer, but finds only a box of pens and a slew of uncontained paper clips.

The ding of an incoming text startles her and she drops the sheath back into the drawer, slamming it shut. The screen of her phone is lit up on Howard’s desk. Her fingers tremble as she slides it toward her.

What kind of trouble are you getting into Alex?

The skin on her neck prickles as she stands and turns toward the outside window. As she approaches her reflection in the rain-flecked glass, she remembers what he said: I’ve seen him in there at night… As an afterthought, she leans over to the light switch, hitting it. The office goes dark, and now she can easily see a brightly lit window in the Excelsior Building and the outline of a dark figure standing at it. She gasps. Across the expanse, Tom stares back at her.