Chapter 8
Chapter
The next day at the office, the overhead lights feel so harsh on my tender, sleep-deprived eyes. My attention keeps flitting between work and the thirty tabs I have open. Pages of keyword searches:
help ghost move on
banish ghost without hurting it
ghost trapped in slack
(Slack’s support FAQ is predictably unhelpful.)
I’m worried about Mom. Imagine, being trapped at work forever? How is she eating? Where does she sleep? After hours of chewing on my thumbnails, I finally try asking.
She sends a string of ROFL emojis—distinctly unsettling, honestly? She never used emojis in life, but she did laugh all the time. And she was always very adaptable.
sampaguita72:
You sound like me.
I did raise you right.
At lunch, Erica shoos me away from my desk, even though I want to keep working my way through my tabs.
“I’m cracking down on sad desk-salad culture around here!” she exclaims.
But I can’t go to the cafeteria. This isn’t the time to risk running into a hot man paying me a confusing amount of attention. (Or maybe more likely: that hot man paying some other girl a confusing amount of attention? Either way, I don’t want to deal with it right now.)
I want to hunker down somewhere to fixate on solving this problem, so I take my sad salad and a book I grabbed off a shelf at home—the Complete Guide to Ghosts and Spirits—and head for the supply closet.
I’m not sure how this book even got onto our shelf; maybe it was one of Tita Wendy’s that slipped into the mix.
When I open the door, someone shrieks.
“Don’t you knock?” Morgan demands, clutching her phone to her chest.
“When I…open a closet?”
She’s sitting on a cardboard box, half-eaten sandwich resting on a paper towel on her lap. Her thumbs hover over her screen, like she was just furiously texting.
Morgan clicks her tongue and seems to notice the Tupperware full of salad I’m holding.
“Get your own lunch spot!” she hisses, blond eyebrows lifting into her hairline.
She waves an impatient hand at her screen.
“There’s so much drama in the Sales Department and my group chats are blowing up.
But Erica’s already lectured me twice about my excessive phone usage.
Why don’t you try the cafeteria? They redid it, it’s nice now. ”
A flash of sun and dimple plays across my mind.
“Morgan, you know so much about this place. What have you heard about Mark Winterson?”
Morgan’s face lights up like she lives to be asked for intel, and she leans toward me conspiratorially. “I heard Erickson handpicked him to come here. He’s, like, his protégé.”
Winfield Erickson, the new CEO who replaced the last head of TKCORP after a decades-long run.
I vaguely remember the press coverage—all these articles about a new era at the company that I skimmed between tasks at my job in New York.
He worked for GE when he was younger, rose through the ranks quickly, then took an unexpected turn into private equity.
There was all this speculation about what an interesting choice he was to revitalize a languishing corporate behemoth. But so far the main thing he’s done is the layoffs.
“Now if you’ll excuse me…” Morgan gestures to the notifications piling up on her phone screen.
“Oh! Right. Thanks,” I say, backing away and closing the door gently. There’s always the stairwell.
I power-walk across the floor, taking the long way that doesn’t go by Erica’s glass-walled office, and slip through the door to the stairs, settling in on the cool concrete.
I’m scanning the Complete Guide’s index for anything about haunted IT infrastructure when there’s noise from below—doors slamming shut, rowdy voices bouncing off the walls. I try to focus on the words in front of me, but the sound of men’s voices gets closer and closer.
Some of the accountants come into view, all in workout clothes, traveling in a pack. They must be heading for the gym on the twelfth floor.
One of them sees me tragically huddled over my salad and laughs. “You okay there?”
“You hiding from someone?” another chimes in.
“Didn’t realize this was the library.”
Some of them snicker, and I scoot over as far as I can to one side while they file past. I’m trying to ignore them, but I can’t help noticing Greg.
He slows down and stops, standing on the stair beside me.
“What are you reading?” he asks softly. There’s something like a door cracked open in his tone.
I peer up at him, snapping the book shut and hiding the cover. “Probably not your taste.”
Greg stares at me. “What’s my taste?”
Shit. I’m dangerously close to giving away how interested I’ve been in his life over the past decade, when we were living on separate coasts and I would take screenshots of his Instagram story, make them bigger to see the books on his nightstand.
I just wanted to know what he was thinking about, even though I wasn’t in his life anymore. I’d pinch in and see some hefty title like Keynes vs. Hayek and How Will Capitalism End? and think, Yeah, he’s still the same.
Greg’s always read a lot—obsessively, late into the night, like he was searching for answers to something—but when it came to school, he’d blow off the readings and fail his tests. Mom would say, That boy has no ambition. He’s not going anywhere.
I look away and hide the book under my arms. “You’re right, I wouldn’t know.”
Greg draws a long, slow breath in, like he would if he’d stubbed his toe and wanted to keep it low-key. But the moment passes quickly, a faint ripple in his usual calm.
He nods, says, “Enjoy your lunch,” and jogs up the stairs to where the other accountants are waiting for him on the landing above.
“Bro, who was that?” one of them asks.
Their footsteps get fainter, and I try to go back to reading. But then some new ones are coming closer, down from above.
“Hey, look who it is!” Mark Winterson says. He’s wearing a crisp gray suit this time, and I feel like I’m hallucinating as I watch him undo his jacket button and sit down next to me. “My favorite Forbes reader.”
A breathless laugh bursts out of me, and I’m overtaken by this helium-headed feeling—cringing at the reference but also weirdly flattered he remembered.
“Oh.” I slide the book underneath my Tupperware. “Hi.”
Mark Winterson is so close to me, our knees almost touch. I can smell his cologne—something sophisticated and masculine that I can’t quite name.
I’m staring at his feet on the step below us, because his face is kind of overwhelming, and recent events have left me structurally unsound as it is.
And it strikes me for the first time how funny men’s dress shoes are.
They’re so shiny and narrow. His trousers have hiked up, sitting like this, revealing ribbed maroon dress socks. They really hug his ankles!
“You, um…you take the stairs often?” I ask.
“Yes, actually.” He rests his elbows on his knees, hands clasped between them. An expensive-looking watch flashes on his wrist. “Don’t judge, but I have this fear of elevators.”
“Oh?”
“The cable.” He shakes his head. “Can’t trust it.”
I press my lips tightly together to keep from laughing. We did walk down the stairs to get lunch, but I assumed he wanted the exercise.
“You get your steps in,” I say. “Win-win.” One of Mom’s favorite phrases.
“See, you get it.” Mark Winterson’s dimple makes an appearance again. “Are…you okay? Do you usually lunch in the stairwell?”
The use of the verb to lunch makes me giggle.
“Usually I dine at my cubicle, but I couldn’t get a reservation.”
He laughs so heartily, it makes me feel better.
I squint at him. Erickson’s protégé. He’s charming, but there’s something too slick about him. Something kind of unsettling.
If it seems too good to be true, Mom would always say, it probably is.
“What’s your deal, Mark Winterson? Are you, like, a Wolf of Wall Street guy?”
His prominent brows rise incredulously. “Whoa. Okay. First of all, we’re not even publicly traded. And second of all”—he waves his finger to punctuate this point—“I consider myself a feminist.”
When I googled him, I did see that he’s on a bunch of charitable boards. One of them had a pink logo.
“Do you have, like…” He trails off with a sideways glance. “Trust issues or something?”
I snort. “Damn, bro, why’d you have to go there?”
“I asked myself what you might do. What’s a probing, slightly inappropriate thing I could say?” He’s trying to tamp down his smile but barely succeeding at it, and it is, unfortunately for me, very cute.
But I can’t get distracted. I’m so ill-equipped for life as it is—with matters of the afterlife added into the mix, I’m totally in over my head.
“Well, uh, nice running into you.” I stand with my book and empty Tupperware tucked under one arm, and—oh God, what?—actually offer him my other hand to shake.
He laughs silently and gives my hand a firm little pump. Wow, grip strength. “Always a pleasure, Ruby.”
I scramble back up the stairs, hand still warm from where his closed around mine.