Unknown number.
UNKNOWN:Years of love have been forgot, in the hatred of a minute.
April stopped so hard her heel squeaked on the marble.
Of all the quotes.
Whoever sent this either had the worst timing in the world—or the best.
She tightened her grip on the phone and kept walking.
The IT floor smelled like coffee and the specific anxiety that came from knowing your entire job was other people’s emergencies.
April approached the help desk, where a guy named Brandon was eating a sandwich and looking at his phone like it contained either the secrets of the universe or the world’s most mediocre meme. Hard to tell.
“Hey,” April said. “I’m getting password reset attempts on my phone and—”
Brandon looked up—sandwich pausing halfway to his mouth. Saw her face. Saw her phone. Then he saw Arthur looming approximately three feet behind her like a mountain that had decided to commute.
“Oh,” he said. “Uh. Jax already flagged this.”
“What?”
“He sent an alert like…” Brandon checked his screen, “three minutes ago. He’s working on it.” He gestured vaguely towardthe elevator, movements careful. “You should go down to the server room. Sublevel. He’s probably waiting.”
The way he saidprobably waitingsounded less like customer service and more likeplease take the scary CFO elsewhere.
“You’re not going to—” April started.
“Jax handles security breaches,” Brandon said quickly. His eyes flicked to Arthur, then back to April. “We handle password resets and printer jams. This is…” He waved at her phone. At Arthur. At the general situation. “This is a Jax thing.”
April opened her mouth to argue, but Arthur was already moving toward the elevator bank, a gravitational pull she apparently couldn’t resist.
She followed.
The elevator doors closed with a soft hiss, sealing them into eight feet of brushed steel and awkward fluorescent lighting.
April pressed the button for sublevel. The elevator lurched downward.
“Years of love have been forgot, in the hatred of a minute.”
The quote kept looping in her head, along with Chad’s face that morning, shocked, then defensive, then cruel. The word dramatic thrown at her like proof.
And now her phone was under attack.
The elevator hummed as it descended. Her reflection stared back from the polished steel, pale and wide-eyed, holding the phone like it might explode. The silence pressed against her ears.
She should probably say something. Arthur had been following her for ten minutes, and she hadn’t acknowledged him beyond that one sideways glance. It felt rude. Or weird, like she was the kind of person who just accepted being shadowed by CFOs.
Maybe I should ask why he’s here. Or thank him. Or—
April glanced at Arthur.
He was staring down at a Texas Instruments calculator, massive thumb tapping keys with surgical precision. Click. Click-clack. Click.
He wasn’t looking at her or the elevator panel or the descending floor numbers, just the small digital screen, like it contained the only truth that mattered.
Is he just calculating right now? In the elevator? While I’m having a crisis?
