Chapter 5 5 - Posy
Posy
Monday, 14 September
The lifts are slow, deliberately so, as if the building is conspiring to keep me in the lobby and away from Ethan as long as possible. I kill the time by scrolling my messages. Nothing from Beth. My notifications are just the usual algorithmic detritus: breaking news, calendar reminders, a popup from a podcast I stopped listening to months ago.
The lift pings. I step inside and press for Level 8, my thumb leaving a slightly greasy smudge on the brushed steel. The doors close and for a moment it’s just me and my reflection in the mirror, my posture all tension and my hair already turning stringy at the fringe. The world inside the lift is cold and small and lined in fake marble, the kind of place where you’d expect to find a crime scene, not a career.
When the doors open again, the first thing I see is the firm’s logo, rendered in thick acrylic, mounted on a wall painted an expensive shade of grey: S T R I K E R | L E G A L. Nobody ever calls it S.L. or Striker & Associates. Always the full name, always the full weight of it.
The reception area is empty except for the fish tank, which bubbles away with all the forced cheer of a school science experiment. I take a breath. The air here is a different species. Its filtered, recirculated, tinged with the faintest note of citrus cleaner.
I can hear voices behind the frosted glass of the meeting room ahead. One is Ethan’s, plummy and precise and carrying the edge of someone who is never, ever wrong. The other is muffled, probably Tiff, the office manager, whose job is to keep Ethan from destroying small businesses and his own reputation in the same day.
I slip past, shoes silent on the carpet, and beeline for my desk. It’s always as I left it: neat, ordered, every file exactly where I put it. There’s something comforting about the geometry of work. I flick on my monitor, and it blinks to life with the low, guilty glow of overwork.
My inbox is already a war zone. I start sifting, filtering, flagging the emergencies and the non-emergencies and the emergencies disguised as non-emergencies. I lose time in the emails: a kind of trance, a muscle memory older than the job itself.
It’s not until I stand to get another coffee that I see him again. Not the broad-shouldered man, but another shape, on the street nine floors below. This one’s narrower, standing in a patch of shade under the awning of the old post office. He’s looking up at the building, head tilted, posture uncannily still.
I move closer to the window, heart tapping a new rhythm. He doesn’t flinch under my gaze. If anything, it feels as though he’s waiting for me to notice him.
After a while, he turns and walks away, vanishing into a clot of pedestrians on the crosswalk.
Maybe I should report it. Maybe I should tell Frank, or even ring the police. But I don’t. I just stand there, watching the street until it empties, and then I return to my desk and my cold coffee and the inbox that will, if I’m lucky, keep me too busy to think.
When the meeting room door opens, Ethan doesn’t so much emerge as arrive, the way weather arrives. Aftershave first, then the suit, then the man inside it, all of him assembled with the kind of care that is less about appearance and more about argument.
He sees me and stops. “Posy.” He says my name the way he says everything, as a verdict. “You’re in early.”
“I’m always in early.”
He considers this, as if I’ve said something that requires filing. His eyes move to my desk, to the files, the monitor, the coffee cup, and I watch him take inventory the way he takes inventory of everything: looking for the gap, the error, the thing he can correct.
“Court tomorrow,” he says. “Walk me through it.”
“Files prepped. Witnesses confirmed. I need your sign-off on the Tayler affidavit.”
“I’ll get to it.” He doesn’t write it down. He never writes anything down. “And the Marsden surveillance I want you on that. You notice things.” He says it without warmth, the way you’d commend a piece of software. “It’s useful.”
“I’ll add it to the list.”
He lingers, which is the part I hate most. The moment after the transaction, when he seems to be waiting for something. Gratitude, maybe, or the small collapse of deference that tells him the hierarchy is intact.
I give him nothing.
Eventually he moves off, and his office door closes behind him with a sound like a case being shut.
The day passes in fragments. Calls, filings, emails, more calls. I see the post office man twice more. Once at lunch, once at four, always in that same slice of shadow. Each time he’s there, I feel my skin prickle, the old fight or flight response humming in my bones. I try to rationalise it, to make it small and ordinary, but it won’t shrink.
At five-thirty, as the office starts to empty, I catch myself staring at the street again. The man is gone. The only movement is a woman pushing a pram, a cyclist in high-vis, a kid with a skateboard. I exhale, force myself to gather my things, and head for the door.
I take the fire stairs on the way down, avoiding the close mirrored space of the lift. Every step is an argument between my rational brain and the part of me that still believes in ghosts.
When I get to the lobby, Frank is gone. Les, the night shift guard, is in his place. I ignore Les. He isn’t my biggest fan. Not since I reported him to HR after he insinuated that we could keep each other company on the nights I was working late.
Fucking gross.
