The silence in my car on the drive back to the city was different than the silence on the way to Lake Forest. The drive there had been heavy with dread, a thick, suffocating blanket of anticipation. The drive back was hollowed out. It was the silence of a building after the demolition charges have gone off—the dust hasn’t settled, but the structure is gone.
I didn’t go straight to my apartment. I couldn’t. The adrenaline was still spiking in my blood, making my hands shake against the leather steering wheel. Instead, I drove to the office.
It was 11:30 p.m. on a Saturday. The Vector Logistics tower was mostly dark, save for the cleaning crews and the glow of the server room on the 14th floor. I badged in. The beep was a comfort. The click-hum of the elevator was a lullaby.
I walked onto my floor. It was empty. The rows of ergonomic chairs stood like sentinels. I walked into my office—the corner suite with the view of the lake that Blake had unknowingly mocked—and sat in the dark.
I pulled the folder out of my briefcase. The rejection letter. The resume. The lies.
I shredded them.
It wasn’t about erasing the evidence. The evidence was burned into the retinas of everyone at that table. It was about closing the file. Case closed.
