Bill had been lingering over her shoulder a little too long in the leather-furniture-clad mocha-lounge-themed break room in a Virginia CIA office. The phony trendiness of the room was so artificial it almost pained her to stay hiding there, a place she was told once held the photocopy machines. She could almost taste the toner in her coffee. Bill was still lingering, but now he stood by the water cooler, taking another paper cupful and then slurping it empty. Finally, she had to say it. “Hi, Bill,” she said, with maximal effort to keep the words from sounding as nasty as she felt. He didn’t deserve it. The way she felt had nothing to do with poor old office Bill. She also knew better than to make eye contact, moving her gaze back to her laptop screen whether he responded or not.

“It’s Friday,” he said. “So, what the heck’s wrong with you?”

Through all his slurping and lingering, the man had a point. Even an office drone like Bill could sense something was wrong with her. Something on a human level. A rare breakthrough. And a rare slip of emotions for Holly.

“Unless you’re working the weekend . . .” he said.

“It’s not the weekend,” Holly said. “It’s what’s about to start in twenty minutes.”

“Yeah. It’s the weekend in twenty minutes.”

“It’s also the party,” she said, imagining the scene of Jim Clayton’s retirement party already taking shape on the floor below them. Cake and Chinese food, Mr. Clayton’s favorite dichotomy. The two poles of his personality, salty and sweet. Holly had mostly known him as sweet. For so long, she’d had her cake and eaten it, too. But now the future spanned out in trays and trays of spicy Szechuan Chinese. That was what he was leaving her with. A salty, spicy new boss. She felt the heartburn coming on just thinking about it.

All Bill could say about it was, “Oh.” And then another slurp.

Some days, Mr. Clayton was the only person she cared about at the field station. He was her beginning, the man who got her intelligence career started. Through his tutelage, he’d rescued and reinvented Holly from the techie equivalent of a street thug: an unrefined basement hacker who became a blip on the radar after hacking a little too whimsically one night in college. A case with law enforcement that went away after a nod from Clayton, from the CIA. A nod that became a handshake. Then an offer. He’d made Holly an offer she couldn’t refuse.

“I liked him, too,” Bill said, talking of Clayton as if he’d passed away. Holly hated funerals.

This party was a funeral.

“Like,” she said.

Bill sputtered and said, “What? Like what?”

“You like him, not liked. He’s still with us.”

“Well, for twenty more minutes, I guess.”

Holly finally turned away from the laptop screen, her work equivalent of minesweeper, to observe Bill’s latest linger: standing next to a tall office fern, and then caressing it softly. She asked why.

“Just checking if it’s real,” Bill said, turning back to her. “So, I take it you’re not too excited about Mr. Johnson.”

Just the name itself got her started. Gary Johnson was the horrible excuse for a man who’d be replacing Clayton.

“He’s actually a good guy,” Bill said. “I mean, if you just give him a chance.”

She gave him a chance. She was still continuing with those chances. It was he, rather, who seemed to have closed the door. He’d started in management of their department with his mind already made up, introducing a negative bias from the onset. It didn’t help that he had personally stuck his neck out to insist that Holly not get hired. She assumed that it helped him that their boss was out of the way for the second in command, Johnson, to take the reins. And now to possibly take Holly’s future in his hands, and crush that future with a merciless vice-like grip.

“Have you ever spent any time with him outside work?” Bill asked. “He’s a completely different person.”

“Different in what way?” Holly said. “You mean, less spiteful and hateful?”

While Bill frowned, Holly imagined in what universe Bill and Gary Johnson had spent any time together. At work, they were pretty far removed on the totem pole. She couldn’t imagine Gary Johnson hanging out with the lackeys.

There was no need to explain it to Bill, however. She figured the less said, the better—especially if he’d known Johnson socially outside work. She made a mental note of that.

“I know I can’t convince you,” Bill said. “But he’s actually a—”

“Don’t,” Holly said, interrupting the beginnings of another try at persuasion. “Don’t try, it’s okay.”

“Well, you’ll see . . .”

“Right, I’ll see.”

“You’ll be fine,” Bill said.

“Right,” Holly said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

“Finer for you right now, since you’re off soon. Since it’s a real Friday for you. I’m sticking around late, and then all day tomorrow.”

Holly wanted to make a snarky comment about what kind of scanning work he’d have to do, or what router issue had kept him so occupied. But instead she smiled and nodded and said, “Good luck.”

“You, too,” Bill said.

Another clock check, the red digital characters signaling the end of her work day, one of the few days of the week where the clock actually mattered. Holly folded down her laptop screen and followed Bill out of the break room, him heading east and her west, images of her kindly old boss smiling and waving moving through her mind. He’d smile and wave and step aside for his replacement, Johnson, and then there would be no more smiling from anyone.

She opened the stairwell door, half expecting to see the grimaced scowl of Johnson smoking in the stairwell, leaning back on the handrail, waiting for her. He’d nod for her to come in, close the door behind.

Her knees suddenly felt weak, making the idea of stairs, and certainly her new boss, highly problematic. Holly let the door shut, remaining on the near side of it, still in the hallway. She turned around and looked back to a small service elevator. Should she really use an elevator for a single floor?

You bet. She pressed the button without any further hesitation, and the door slid open with even less. Then she saw his smile. Johnson was smiling. Why was he smiling?

Gary Johnson was alone in the service elevator with a mail cart topped with various chilled plastic bottles of soda. He nodded for her to come in.

She stood in place, frozen, but beginning to warm. The warmth started in her face.

“Going down?” he asked.

She sure as hell felt like it.

“Let’s go,” he said, saying it softly. It scared the crap out of her. She didn’t like the soft pleading tone he’d use for commands. His passive aggression, the seething hatred felt under the surface the whole time Mr. Clayton had been in charge. She’d seen enough of it to know Gary for exactly the kind of man he was. Someone she wouldn’t be surprised to learn had “a problem with women,” especially a woman student. Especially a woman hacker.

“You’re going down,” he said, “because you pressed the down button. Otherwise—”

“Actually, sorry,” Holly said, her brain misfiring a few times before providing the answer. “I think I need the exercise.”

“You need one floor of exercise?”

“All I can get.”

Johnson held the door open as it closed on him, the reflective metal sliding back into the wall. “Hey, just a second,” he said. “Are you alright?”

“What do you mean, am I alright?”

“I know, you’re sad. Right? I know . . .”

“Am I sad Mr. Clayton is leaving?”

“Yes,” he said. “You are. And it’s okay.”

“Yeah.”

Johnson said, “I’m sad, too.”

The door began to slide shut again, and it was his foot this time, kicking over fast and knocking the door away as if he’d done it millions of times. As if it was his job, hard and swift and without thought.

She half wanted to get it over with, finally just walk in the elevator and endure the fifteen seconds of awkwardness on their trip down. Or she could turn around and walk away. Deal with him another day when he actually was her boss.

She supposed he was already, in some small way. He was a superior. It was almost inexplicable and horrible, but it was the truth. It was the reality, staring right back into her face.

Johnson stepped forward, this time not to knock the door back, but to leave the elevator entirely, still smiling at her, so damn polite and snarky. “Let’s hold on a minute,” he said.

Holly backed up a few steps, a cold tingle rushing down her spine.

“Let’s just hold on,” Johnson repeated.

“Okay... What about the drinks cart?”

“We don’t have to hate each other,” he said as the door began to shut. It made a slight scraping sound as the door came closed against the wall frame, and then a solid thunk, followed by the deeper mechanical groaning of the elevator dropping away from their floor.

What was he talking about? Hate? Of course she didn’t hate him. It was the other way around.

“Do you get what I mean?” he asked.

“No, sir,” she said politely.

“You don’t have to call me sir. But thanks.”

“How about in twenty minutes?” Holly said. “Will I have to, then?”

“You mean ten? No thanks.” He stood in place, still, thank God. In the silence, Holly wondered about the sad drink cart, alone in the elevator, maybe rolling slightly to one side as it dropped down through the dark toward the party below. She imagined the doors opening up to some delightfully surprised guest. She imagined the warmth on the other side. Life down there, so far away.

Johnson brushed some lint off his shoulder and said, “I actually don’t start until Monday.”

Holly nodded.

“And you’re off till then, anyway.”

Holly nodded and said, “Yeah,” but left out the thank God. Johnson was on a need-to-know basis with pretty much every single bit of non-work-related information, especially in this last weekend of him not yet existing as her boss.

He nodded his head a little, plus a little youthful cocky smile. “We should get some exercise together.”

Holly couldn’t quite register the reason for her repulsion, but she felt it strong and growing.

“Take the elevator down to the bottom and then race up the stairs,” he said. “Race to the top.”

“Not in these shoes,” she said quickly.

“Fine. So what can you do in those shoes? Can we be friends? They’re nice shoes, by the way.”

“Thanks.”

“So what do you say?”

“I say . . . sure.” She paused. “Gary, were you ever aware of a time or a place or reason that were weren’t friends? I mean, I’m trying to put it all together here.”

“Put what together?”

Holly said, “I’m trying to figure out what we’re coming back from to now be friends.”

“Oh.”

“Weren’t we always friends?”

He smiled and said, “Of course.”

“Right? I thought we were good.”

“Of course, we were and are,” Johnson said. “But any time you want to get real with me, and have a real discussion, you know where my office is. I’ll be moving into Mr. Clayton’s on Monday morning.”

Holly instantly wondered if she could get through her entire CIA career without having to step foot into that fucking office. Not a single time. Not once. No.

“By the way,” Johnson said, “I’ll be evaluating you on a day-to-day basis. Not on some bullshit that went down in the past. Okay? Not on some old grudge.”

“Bullshit like what?”

“Huh?”

Holly said, “What’s the grudge?”

“How you got hired. It doesn’t matter that you were his pet project. It doesn’t matter how I thought we should have left you to rot in jail. None of that matters anymore. Got it?”

She could hear the words and see his face contorting ever so slightly as he said them, but she couldn’t feel out the true intentions behind it all. At least not yet. She’d learned not to take anything he said or did at face value. She knew not to get lazy and assuming about him, or to take her eye off the target when Gary was around. He’d shown enough evidence that he was a master manipulator, among other things. Until that moment, she’d been able to coast along, avoiding him, and that had continued to be her plan, up until the elevator doors opened. It might not be possible to coast much further.

She could stick it out.

Could she believe him?

No. But she could stick it out. “Thanks,” Holly said, “for your honesty and frankness.”

“It’s the least I can do. And I’ll be honest again: I’m more or less doing this for me. Not you. You know what I mean? It’s been awkward. Right?”

Holly waited to see where he was trying to take her before saying anything.

“You can admit it,” Johnson said. “It’s been extremely awkward, all this time. All this tension between us. You knew I didn’t like you; you knew I didn’t trust in your ability.”

“You still don’t.”

“Which one?” Johnson said.

“Like and trust. I don’t think it’s possible to just gain those overnight because you want to take the awkwardness away.”

“I’m doing it because I’m your boss and it’s the right thing to do. Turn over a new leaf.” He smiled coyly. “Dare I say, a new beginning?”

“This is a lot.” Holly took a moment to think it through, trying not to sigh too loudly. It was definitely a lot to take in. Especially right now. Johnson had a habit of cornering his opponents, of hitting them hard. Part of that killer’s instinct is why he was in the position to take over command in this little boutique branch of the CIA. And a good part of that scared the crap out of her.

She took another breath, and held it.

“We deserve a new beginning,” he said.

Holly kept her gaze on the floor. “Yeah.”

“Nothing rose-colored, mind you. Nothing fake. Like I said, I’ll be evaluating you on the daily.”

“Thank you, Gary; that’s very comforting.”

“Well, it should be,” he said. “It could be a lot worse. I could be prejudiced against your performance. Against every little move you make. You don’t want that, right?”

“I just want to move on,” Holly said.

“Right.”

“Thanks.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Thanks for moving on together. I guess I’ll see you at the party?”

“Probably,” Holly said, though she immediately wondered how large the room was going to be, how many people were there, how many options she’d have for hiding from her tormentor and future boss.

She didn’t notice the low whirring sound of the elevator this time after Johnson had pressed the button during their exchange. She could only register the fact that he was leaving her, that it would soon be over. That was all the information she needed to process from the gesture. It was that, plus the need to continue with her fake, plastered smile—the one that matched his.

When the elevator arrived for the second time, the doors opened to the same drink cart that Johnson had left behind. It looked untouched, in the same place he’d left it.

“Well,” he said. “Get a look at that.”

“Yeah, the cart,” she said with barely any intonation. “I’ll see you later.”

She knew later would be the retirement party—something she would have to attend purely out of her love for Mr. Clayton. But she needed a little break first, an opportunity to collect herself. To go over what had happened, what Johnson had said.

And what he didn’t say.

She zoomed toward the stairwell, this time taking them up and not down, fast and energized. Her legs were no longer tired. It was not five o’clock in her brain. It was time, perhaps, to consider a career change.

This one would never be the same.

Upstairs, on the fifth level, the quiet was suffocating. She could only imagine the festivities below, the cocktails, the music, everything so unlike the normal office work environment. The laughter down below . . . The idea of laughter almost sounded strange.

Up above, in her own private hell, Holly hunkered down over her desk, going over again the list of assignments she’d had backed up for weeks. Looking for the deadlines and comparing her estimates to finish. It was enough to make her sick, even back when Clayton was in charge.

She’d made the solemn promise to herself to catch up, months ago, when it was manageable. When it made sense to her. Get back on track and up to date before the new boss rolled in. At least start with him on good terms. It was the least she could do for herself, not give Johnson such a reason to be his usual prick self.

Watching her screen and worrying and catastrophizing, Holly was a little glad to see an email pop up in real time. She saw the bolded text, which meant new. But then she actually read the text. It was from her aunt. And it said, Call home ASAP please.

It was her aunt’s way of breaking through security to get through to her niece. Not very ingenious, and she supposed it worked occasionally. Today it worked quite well. Holly was actually looking forward to an outside distraction.

She was on the phone a moment later. “Hi, Terri,” she said. “The house isn’t on fire or anything, right?”

“No, we’re all fine here except for your cousin,” Terri said with a sigh. “Well, we’re actually not fine because of what she’s done to us, making us worry like this, you know.”

“I don’t,” Holly said. “What do you mean?”

“Beth hasn’t been around for days. Her phone’s off, voicemail full.”

The bit about the phone, especially, seemed like classic Beth. Either that or she forgot to charge her phone, or misplaced the charger, or just misplaced the phone entirely. Beth was flighty, but otherwise lived a very “safe” lifestyle. She might travel at the drop of a hat, but she always stayed in her lane—unlike Holly.

“You know,” Terri said again. “No answer from emails, no nothing.”

“How many days?”

“A couple.”

“So, two?” Holly said. “Two days?”

“Yeah, a few, two and a half. I wanted to see if you’ve heard from her since Tuesday.”

“I haven’t,” Holly said. “I haven’t heard from anyone.”

“I know you like it like that when you get busy,” Terri said, “but it can be hard on the rest of the family.”

Holly sighed, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. “I bet I know what happened. Beth went on Phish tour.”

“Fish what?”

“Phish, Aunt Terri. The band?”

“Oh,” Terri said, seeming to understand better now that she was properly addressed.

“You know how she gets up and goes, especially going without telling anyone. And she’s also a grown woman, so . . .”

Her aunt’s tone changed when she huffed and said, “You can be a grown woman and actually act like one, and not disappear off the face of the planet anytime the mood strikes you.”

“Terri,” Holly said, “She’s a grown woman in college.”

“It makes no different where she is.”

There was a little truth to that statement. Beth could be deep in the stacks of her university library, or mopping the floor at her part-time barista job, or right up on stage at a Phish concert, and once the mood struck her to flee, she would spring into action and never look back—phone in hand or not. It didn’t matter where she was, who she was with, or what she had with her once the need to migrate set in.

“So Beth went to a concert thing, then? Is that what she told you?”

“She didn’t tell me anything,” Holly said.

“Is that your guess, then?”

“I’m just saying it’s Beth being Beth.”

Terri said, “I wish she could be a little less like Beth, then. Maybe a little more like you.”

Any normal person—perhaps any normal, non-self-hating person would have thought of that as a compliment. But to Holly, it sounded like an unjust punishment for a younger cousin that had done nothing wrong—yet. Holly’s biggest mistake, so far, was to listen to a dare, and then listen to that stubborn part of her spirit that couldn’t back down, and then follow through with a challenge of hacking into the government’s classified files.

It didn’t seem like a mistake until agents showed up to her dorm room the next morning. That little mistake, three years back, was good enough to somehow land her a job at the very place she broke into, a job with the CIA in trying to stop the same thing she’d just done. And despite the illustriousness of the position, and how cool it sounded, and how nice the paychecks were, she still felt in some way that she was in fact paying for that mistake in some long, drawn-out psychological torture experiment. And perhaps now that Johnson was in charge, she’d be suffering a lot more.

Terri spoke again, intruding into Holly’s walk down memory lane. “Can you try to convince her to be more like her big cousin? Can you give that a try?”

“I really wish you wouldn’t say things like that.”

“What, too much pressure?”

Holly stayed quiet. She definitely felt pressure, but it wasn’t from her aunt. But what was it that she was feeling so strongly?

Shit. Terri was still talking. “Is it too much to ask of my daughter to not disappear so much? Is it too much to want her to follow a path like yours?”

“Terri . . .”

“You refuse to call me Aunt Terri, but at least you don’t vanish into thin air!”

Holly spent the next two minutes talking her aunt down off the ledge of paranoia regarding the “disappearance” of Beth, soothing her with easy rationales about Beth’s flighty nature. She’d even set a deadline when they could all be officially worried together. “In a couple of days.” So, by her aunt’s calculations, that would make it roughly a week. A week of no word from Beth wouldn’t be out of the question, but it would at least be enough for Holly to begin donating some of the time and effort away from the work she so sorely needed to catch up on.

Either way, whether Beth turned up or not, Holly would have the weekend to herself. Well, to her work. Herself alone with her work. It sounded like a truly miserable weekend.

Hanging up from the call, Holly started the effort to pull herself out of the beginnings of a minimal spiral into depression, envying the freedom of Beth and anyone else not tied down with a job like CIA intelligence analyst and Gary Johnson for a boss. Although she’d been better than Beth at hiding her flights from her family, Holly was once a free spirit who would also whisk herself away at a moment’s notice. She’d done so all through college, and right up to her hiring on three years ago with Mr. Clayton.

The flying all came to an end, obviously. And she was fine with that. That was the price she paid for not going to jail, for getting bailed out of some major trouble, and for being offered a job that even she at the time thought she didn’t deserve. Holly supposed that a temporary break from life on the road was the least of her sacrifices. Now the question was how could she explain that to Beth, so her younger cousin would act in a way that would result in a few less panicked emails and calls from Terri. Perhaps she could take that on in the weekend homework as well.

Being an analyst, Holly couldn’t deny she loved getting her hands on up-to-the-minute, bleeding-edge info and tech, but what college grad wouldn’t want to slink back into the haze of those dorm days, even if only for one weekend? Even better, in the basement of the residential hall, where she’d had the most fun. Late nights and even later days, taking turns on and off with alternate teams of student hacktivists. Her little collective there was where she first got serious about the possibility of it being “work.” She just hadn’t known then what side she’d be working for. The good guys or the bad. The Man or the criminal underworld.

It turned out Mr. Clayton made that decision for her. What was Johnson about to do?

Of course, Holly could maybe have one last-ditch effort to save herself by convincing Mr. Clayton to stay on board and not retire at the end of the day. That wouldn’t be too hard, right? She could do it at the party. Perhaps get him drunk enough to forget his age and to forget hardships that go along with heading their department.

Better yet, she could convince Johnson about the opposite. It would be too much for him. Too much work and not enough pay or recognition. Surely, he could find some better private-world job out there, like used-car salesman.

On the way back down to the party level, Holly did everything she could to block out her last conversation with Johnson. Forget it all. Forget that he’d be there tonight at the party. Just go and enjoy the twenty minutes or so that she’d allow herself to stay. There was so much work to be done...

Downstairs, the big oak double doors of the boardroom were propped open, sounds of a good time wafting out. The smell of alcohol, too. Holly would have to make a dash for the bar and grab whatever she could. It hardly mattered so long as it would blunt her consciousness. It might also blunt her tongue, but that was okay. Maybe she could get liquored up enough to not care how she went about convincing Clayton to stay and convincing Johnson to go ahead and fuck off.

She spotted Bill right away. He was sipping on a bottle of beer instead of a paper cup of water. He seemed to avoid eye contact with her. Holly went back to the bar to turn her single into a double, some kind of whiskey in some kind of cola. The only thing that mattered was the effect it had on her. After the first few sips, she had half a mind to make a stop on the way home at a liquor store, get something to make working till midnight worth her while. Get something to help her actually sleep when she was finished for the night. Staring into the screen, her brain working overtime, it was hard to turn off at the end of the day.

Out of the corner of her eye, while taking a nice long sip of a too-strong drink, Holly saw Johnson again. He seemed to move around the periphery of the party like a shark arriving to a school of fish, his eyes darting around, his smile turning on and off like a light switch. That always seemed to be his M.O., turn it off and on when necessary. He’d tried doing that with her moments before, near the elevator. He’d tried being the nice guy. Holly watched again as his smile quickly faded, thinking back and imagining how fast it left him after their conversation ended.

Was he smiling when he left?

Likely not.

Another long sip. It was starting to feel warm and good. She wondered how many she’d need to stay even ten minutes there. She wondered where Clayton was. The sooner she could find him, and desperately cling on to and hug him, the sooner she could leave and begin the process of moving on. Closure, then preparation for her upcoming battles that would begin in a merciless forty-eight hours.

There were no official events or speeches planned, thank God—or so she assumed. Even if there had been a speech from Mr. Clayton, the man himself, she could see herself crying in hysterics before he was through.

Fuck it . . . drunk yet or not, Holly needed to find Clayton and say hello, kiss him on the cheek, set a date to actually have some time to speak with him properly, and then leave this whole mess of a Friday and be done with it.

After her first drink, she didn’t need another. She just needed to find him and leave. But it was a difficult task, finding the most sought-after man in the room. She looked for the biggest cluster of people and guessed he’d be at the center of it. She saw her kindly boss through the outside ring, his head nodding as if to accept another compliment, another elaboration of how much he’d be missed. Before Holly could sneak in, her phone rang through her purse. Her private cell.

The number was local but unfamiliar. She answered while watching Mr. Clayton smile, him seeming to tell some long, drawn-out story now. She heard the distant laughter of his crowd, and then a Russian accent in her ear. A man asking for Holly.

“Who is this?” Holly said.

“A business contact.”

“What business?”

“Human trafficking,” the man said, slowly, and definitely Russian.

Had she misheard? Had he really said that? “Excuse me?”

“We’ll need you to listen carefully, and to act carefully,” the voice said.

She stiffened. “Do you have a name?” “No.”

“You don’t have a name?”

“We have your cousin.”

Another laugh from the crowd. Holly could see Mr. Clayton’s eyes on her now, but it meant nothing.