Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Annie
I know something is wrong before I even set my bag down.
It’s not dramatic, with alarms and broken windows. There’s no mysterious shadow sprinting through the hallway with a villain soundtrack playing behind him.
It’s smaller than that. Worse, somehow.
My desk drawer is open by maybe half an inch.
That’s it. Barely anything. A sliver.
The kind of thing most people wouldn’t notice unless they were specifically looking for it, and I’m not specifically looking for it so much as I feel it the second I walk into the office.
It’s like my skin catches on the wrongness before my brain does. I stop in the doorway.
The office is hushed in that too clean Ironwood way, all soft printer droning and polished wood, and order arranged so aggressively it starts to feel threatening.
Morning light cuts across the floor in neat gold bars. Sherry’s desk out in the main office is empty, probably because she’s gone to bully the copier into submission, or charm a delivery driver into moving his truck three feet to the left.
Everything looks normal.
Everything except that drawer.
I stare at it for a beat too long, trying to decide if this is one of those moments where I’m being ridiculous.
Maybe I left it open Friday. Maybe I got distracted by a spreadsheet, or a question, or Cody appearing at my elbow like a creepy math ghost and forgot to push it shut all the way.
Maybe.
But the feeling in my stomach says no.
I step closer slowly, like the desk might confess if I don’t spook it.
The pen cup by my monitor is off too.
Not by much. An inch, maybe less. Just enough that it isn’t sitting on the faint ring left in the wood where it always rests.
The pens inside are still lined up, but not in the order I put them in. Black, blue, black, red, mechanical pencil.
Now it’s blue, black, red, black, mechanical pencil.
My heartbeat stutters.
No.
No, no, no.
I set my bag down too fast and the strap slips off my shoulder. My fingers are already clumsy when I grab the drawer and pull it open the rest of the way.
Folders. Sticky notes. Charger. The gross little stash of throat lozenges I bought last week because the office air is dry enough to mummify a person.
Nothing obviously missing.
My pulse doesn’t care. It keeps climbing anyway.
I look at the desk surface again. At the monitor, the keyboard, the stack of invoices I left clipped together. They’re still clipped together, but crooked now, the top page shifted just slightly left.
It’s nothing.
It’s not nothing.
I reach for my camera bag before I even consciously decide to.
The zipper feels louder than it should as I yank it open. My camera body is there. Spare battery, lens cloth, notebook, card wallet…
I freeze.
The card wallet is unzipped.
For one stupid second my brain refuses to understand what I’m looking at. It just hangs there uselessly while my body goes cold all over.
Then my hand dives in.
One slot empty.
I check again, because denial is powerful and I’ve always respected the commitment of a good delusion.
Still empty.
I flip through every slot, fingers shaking harder now, pulse thudding in my ears.
Oh shit.
It’s the black sixteen gig card with the tiny silver scratch in one corner. Old enough that I stopped using it for active shoots, but too important to wipe.
I keep backups spread out because I’m not an idiot, and because life has taught me that if you only keep one copy of something you love, the universe gets ideas.
That card has photos from three years of jobs. Road trips, landscapes, old ranches. Horses, sunsets I couldn’t explain to anyone who wasn’t there, and stupid selfies with Evan where he refused to smile properly.
One blurry Christmas photo from when he was nineteen and trying too hard to look grown up in a sweater our mother bought him because it was “classically handsome,” which was her way of saying “boring.”
It has pictures of my dad standing on a dock with his hands in his pockets, staring out at water instead of at me.
It has two photos of my mother that I actually like.
Two.
Which sounds pathetic until you’ve met Elaine Wright and understand that liking a photo of her means the camera caught her looking away from herself long enough to become human.
My throat tightens so fast it hurts.
I empty the bag onto the desk.
Lens cap. Receipts. Lip balm. Spare cable. Notebook. Tampon. Granola bar. Battery pack. A packet of gum with exactly one piece left. All of it lands in a frantic little pile that feels insulting in its uselessness.
I search the bag again anyway. Then again, like the card might magically rematerialize if I’m obsessive enough.
“Annie?”
I jerk so hard I nearly knock my camera body off the desk.
Sherry stands in the doorway, coffee in one hand, brows lifting as she takes in the mess. “Whoa. You okay?”
No.
“Fine,” I say automatically, because apparently my first instinct in a crisis is lying badly. “I just… can’t find something.”
“What something?”
My mouth opens, then closes.
There’s a weird shame to panic when it isn’t neat. When it doesn’t look rational from the outside.
If I say someone moved my stuff and now a memory card is gone, maybe I sound careless. Maybe I sound dramatic.
Maybe I sound like I’m trying to stir up trouble one week into a job where everyone already seems to expect me to either impress them or combust.
“It’s probably nothing,” I say.
Sherry’s expression softens, but there’s a crease between her brows now. “Annie.”
I drag a hand through my hair. “I had an SD card in my camera bag. I keep old photos on it. It’s gone.”
Her eyes flick to the wallet, the desk, the half open drawer. “Gone as in misplaced? Or gone as in gone?”
“I don’t know.”
That’s when the panic really hits.
I crouch to check under the desk. Check my tote. Check the side pocket of my bag even though I never put cards there. My breathing goes thin and raw.
“It was here. I know it was here when I arrived at Ironwood. I checked my bag. I always check my bag.”
“Hey.” Sherry sets her coffee down and crouches too, like maybe the card will reveal itself out of solidarity. “Okay, hang on. Just… take a second, alright? Breathe…”
“I am breathing.”
“You are, but…” she gives me a small, careful smile, “it’s a little fast. Just… slow it down a bit.”
I laugh once, horribly, which isn’t the same as calming down. “Someone touched my desk.”
Sherry stills. “Are you sure?”
I point at the drawer. The pen cup. The papers. Tiny details that sound insane once spoken aloud but make perfect, awful sense in my head.
“That wasn’t me. I didn’t leave it like that.”
Sherry straightens slowly. “Maybe one of the cleaners?”
“Do cleaners unzip card wallets?”
She doesn’t answer.
I hate the way hope flares anyway, desperate and stupid. “Maybe I dropped it in my room. Maybe I switched it out and forgot.”
“Yeah, that could be it. That happens. When you’re tired, or distracted, or just… thinking about too many things at once.”
It doesn’t. Not really. But I grab it because the alternative feels like stepping off something high with no idea how far down it goes.
“Yeah,” I say too quickly. “Yeah, maybe.”
“Do you want help looking?”
The decent answer would be yes.
The true answer is I don’t want witnesses while I unravel.
“I’ll check my room first,” I say. “It’s probably there.”
Sherry hesitates, studying my face like she can see every crack I’m trying to hold together with spite and caffeine. “Okay. But if you need me—”
“I know.”
I don’t wait long enough for the conversation to become kind.
I scoop everything back into my bag with less care than it deserves and head for the hallway, heartbeat banging hard enough to make my vision feel strange around the edges.
The house is already alive with Monday noise. Boots on wood, a radio crackling from somewhere farther down the corridor, the smell of coffee and bacon drifting from the kitchen. Sunlight on the floors.
Too much normal around me for my brain to accept.
I cut through it like I’m late for something. And maybe I am.
Maybe I’m late to the moment where this gets worse.
My room is exactly as I left it.
Bed made poorly, books scattered across it, cardigan over the chair, boots by the door, camera charger plugged in beside the desk.
I drop to my knees and tear through the top drawer.
Socks. Sports bras. T-shirts rolled tighter than necessary because moving around a lot teaches you how to fit a life into temporary spaces.
No SD card.
Nightstand. Desk drawer. Suitcase pocket. Toiletry bag.
Nothing.
I strip the bed.
Blankets, sheets, pillowcases yanked loose and thrown aside in escalating defeat. I check under the mattress like a woman in a deeply unhinged home invasion documentary.
Then under the bed, where all I find is one hair tie, a receipt from Larsen’s, and enough dust to insult the entire concept of polished ranch living.
Still nothing.
“Have you seen a memory card?” I ask the first ranch hand I pass in the hallway.
He blinks at me. “A what?”
“Small. Black. About this big.” I hold my fingers up with the desperate precision of someone who knows exactly how ridiculous she looks. “From a camera.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Right. Thanks.”
I move on.
Kitchen. Laundry room. Main sitting room I’ve never actually sat in because it feels like a magazine layout and I prefer furniture I can trust.
No card.
I ask another staff member. A woman from housekeeping whose name I still feel guilty for not fully catching my first day.
She shakes her head, sympathetic and wary all at once. “Sorry, honey. You lose something?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
I force a smile that probably belongs in a hostage video. “Just trying not to accuse the universe before I have evidence.”
She gives me a look that says the universe has probably earned it.
I check the office again. More thoroughly this time. Under the desk, behind the printer, inside the drawer twice, even though I know it isn’t there. I flip through files, as if an SD card could disguise itself as an invoice and live a second life in expense reports.
Sherry appears with a frown and helps me check anyway.
Nothing.