He stood there for a moment, gripping the handle, looking down at the cleaning supplies arranged in their usual slots. Then he finished the floor. He emptied the trash in the corridor, wiped down the surfaces in the conference room, and took the elevator back to the 48th floor without deviating from his route. He clocked out at 6:15 in the morning and drove home in the pale gray light of early dawn.
Maya was still asleep. He checked on her from the doorway. She was curled on her side, Gerald the rabbit tucked under her arm, her breathing slow and even. Thomas sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the last inhaler on the counter, the one with maybe four days of doses left in it.
By the end of the week, he wouldn't have to count anymore. He didn’t know yet what he had agreed to. He didn’t know what Evelyn Croft's bruising meant, or how serious it was, or what it would cost him to be the one person in a nine-billion-dollar company who knew the truth about her. He only knew that he had looked at that piece of paper and made the only calculation that made sense to him, the same calculation he had been making for seven years.
Whatever it takes to keep Maya safe. He put the inhaler back on the counter. He went to bed. Outside the city was beginning to wake up, and somewhere on the 50th floor of Apex Holdings, Evelyn Croft was already at her desk, already working, already carrying whatever it was she was carrying alone as she had apparently been for a very long time.
Thomas closed his eyes and told himself he was ready for whatever came next. He was wrong, of course. But he didn’t know that yet. The first week was the hardest, not because the tasks were difficult, but because Thomas had spent two years perfecting the art of being unnoticed, and now he was being asked to operate in spaces where every detail was observed.
The 50th floor had its own rhythm, quieter than the floors below, but charged in a way that the lower floors weren’t. People up there moved with purpose and spoke in low, clipped sentences, and they looked at Thomas the way people looked at furniture they hadn't chosen but had decided to tolerate. He kept his head down. He moved when he was supposed to move and stayed still when he was supposed to stay still.
Evelyn’s instructions came in the form of typed notes left in a sealed envelope on his cart twice a week, specific, spare, written as though she had edited every unnecessary word out before printing. Tuesday medication case left credenza drawer transfer to green bag before 9:00 p.m. Do not leave the bag unattended. Thomas followed the instructions exactly and asked no questions. What surprised him was how quickly the work began to feel like a second kind of discipline, different from the military, different from the warehouse, but familiar in its structure.