Persona-lity Novel | Part 4, Chapter 14: Marcus

She was almost at the elevator.

She had her bag on her shoulder and her coat buttoned and the VISITOR sticker still on her lapel that she hadn't thought to remove yet, and the elevator button was already lit — someone had called it from below — when she heard him.

Not her name. He was too careful for that, too aware of the open floor behind him, the heads that were still down but not deaf. Just footsteps. Fast. The specific rhythm of someone who had made a decision and was moving before they could unmake it.

She turned.

Marcus was crossing the floor toward her with his jacket half on and his face wrong; too much color, a dampness at his temple, the particular flush of someone whose body had committed to something before the mind had fully signed off. He wasn't running. It was faster than walking and slower than running and it was the most undone she had ever seen him.

He reached her. Didn't touch her. Looked at her and then past her and then at her again.

"Conference room," he said. Very quietly.

She looked at him for a moment; at the flush, the damp temple, the jacket that was still half on. She had known Marcus for four years. She knew, with the specific clarity of someone who noticed things for a living, exactly what this was. Not just the Krauss arrangement. Not just guilt.

She said nothing about it.

Then she stepped away from the elevator and walked to the nearest conference room and he followed her in and closed the door behind them.

✻ ✻ ✻

The room was small. Four chairs, a table, a window looking out at the building next door. The kind of room used for calls nobody wanted overheard. Marcus stood with his back against the door like he needed it to stay closed and didn't sit and didn't take his jacket all the way off.

He was breathing slightly harder than he should have been for a walk across a newsroom. He also hadn't looked directly at her since the door closed, which told her everything the breathing had already told her.

"I said no," he said. "Last night. On the phone. I said no."

"You did."

"I meant it." He pressed his hand to the back of his neck, looked at the ceiling briefly, looked back at her. "I meant it when I said it."

She said nothing. She just waited, the way she waited for everything; still, patient, giving the silence enough room to do its work.

Marcus reached into his inside jacket pocket. His hand was not entirely steady. He pulled out a piece of paper — not printed, handwritten, small and folded once, the writing compressed and fast like it had been done in a hurry and not looked at again after. He held it out.

She took it.

Unfolded it.

Name: [REDACTED]

Medication: Sertraline • 100mg

Pharmacy: Northside Wellness Pharmacy

Address: 2847 N Clark St, Chicago

Prescriber: Dr. [REDACTED]

[Click to view]

She looked at it for a moment. Then she looked at him.

His face was still too red. There was a line of sweat at his hairline that he hadn't wiped away, either because he hadn't noticed or because wiping it would have been an acknowledgment. He was looking at a point slightly past her left shoulder.

"The Krauss arrangement," he said. "You meant it."

"I always mean it."

He nodded. A single tight nod.

"I need to know it goes away."

"When this is done," she said. "The folder closes."

"And nothing else. After this, nothing else. You don't call me, you don't come to me, you don't—" He stopped. "This is the last thing."

She folded the paper again. Put it in her coat pocket.

"This is the last thing," she said.

He looked at her directly for the first time since they'd come into the room. His eyes were the eyes of someone who had just done something they already knew they were going to have to live with.

"He's a person," Marcus said. Quietly. Not an accusation. Almost like he was reminding himself. "He's just a person taking medication for something real. If someone interferes with that—"

"I know what it is."

"Do you." He said it flatly. Not a question either.

She held his gaze.

He looked away first. The color in his face hadn't gone anywhere. He pulled his jacket straight with the careful precision of someone trying to reassemble something.

"I'm going to forget this conversation happened," he said. "Starting in about thirty seconds."

"That's fine," she said.

He nodded. Didn't move immediately. There was a half-second — brief, almost nothing — where he stood at the door with his hand on the handle and didn't open it. Then he did.

He walked back out into the newsroom without looking back. He didn't need to. She already knew he would check, later, whether she'd looked.

She hadn't. She watched him through the glass; the heads coming up as he passed, nobody looking at the conference room, the floor resuming its normal hum like a current that had briefly flickered and steadied again.

✻ ✻ ✻

She stood in the small room alone for a moment.

Put her hand in her coat pocket. Felt the folded paper.

Then she picked up her bag and walked to the elevator and pressed the button and waited, and when the doors opened she stepped in and watched the newsroom through the closing gap; the monitors, the heads down, Marcus already back at his desk with his back to her, completely still.

The doors closed.

She took the paper out of her pocket and unfolded it again in the elevator light.

A name. A dosage. A pharmacy on the north side.

She memorized it in four seconds and put it back.

The elevator reached the lobby. She peeled the VISITOR sticker off her coat and dropped it in the bin by the door without breaking stride.

Outside, Chicago was grey and cold and going about its business.

She started walking.

✻ ✻ ✻

Four seconds. That's all it takes to memorize something you'll never forget.