Watching You: Part 2 – Chapter 9 – Deleted
I was still in the office when it got dark outside.
Rain against the windows, the kind that starts thin and forgets to stop. Everyone else had left hours earlier.
I don’t remember when exactly the floor had emptied – I’d stopped tracking it somewhere after seven, the way you stop tracking a sound that’s been constant long enough to become silence.
Four years since university. One year as general manager.
Greg had retired that spring. Wanted to spend what he called quality time with his woman, who happened to be my mother, and I hadn’t argued with the timing of it.
He’d built the company into something worth inheriting the reins of, and I’d been ready for exactly as long as he’d been ready to hand it over, which was one of the few things in my life that had ever lined up that cleanly.
Since then, most of my nights looked like this one. Empty office. Overhead lights on a floor nobody else was using. Food eaten at my desk between emails I could’ve answered from home and chose not to.
I’d never been alone in the ways that are supposed to matter to people my age.
Women liked me. Sometimes more than I wanted them to.
Some of them liked the suit – the title, the corner office, the version of me that came with a company attached to it.
Some of them liked me better without it, which I understood even less, and cared about even less than that.
They liked the feeling of it. Power, proximity to it, whatever word you want to use for wanting to be near something that clearly has options and chooses you anyway, temporarily.
Some of them stayed a night.
Some stayed a few months.
None of them stayed in my head after they left.
Mia never left mine.
I want to be precise about something, because precision is the only thing I have left to offer you at this point in the story.
Mia had nothing to do with why I stayed late.
She had everything to do with why I didn’t go home afterward.
If I’m being honest – and I’ve decided somewhere along the way that I am going to be, all the way through this, whatever it costs me – was that I’d checked her profile an hour earlier, the way I checked it most weeks, some rotation I’d never formally scheduled but had never once actually skipped either.
Checking her profile had become something like locking the office door.
I didn’t remember deciding to do it.
I just noticed when I hadn’t.
I wasn’t checking whether she’d posted.
I was checking whether she still existed somewhere I could see.
It wasn’t there.
I refreshed.
Nothing.
Typed her name instead of using the bookmark.
Nothing.
Interesting.
Apparently people can disappear twice.
Deleted.
Not private.
Not restricted.
Gone.
I refreshed.
Nothing.
Again.
Nothing.
…
Fuck.