“As you might already know, we are owned by a corporate group called Lumines. All the chemicals and compounds sorted at our factory are made for a more specialized group of workers at headquarters. Chemicals of the highest grade—what we specialize in producing—are required in order to produce the purest forms of sand. But the real work happens off-site, at a building outside the city. We need a manager there. It is very exacting, very demanding work. You seem capable of it.” Maclan rose from his chair and walked around to her side, where he leaned against the desk and looked down at her. She tried to keep her eyes steady on his, but he towered over her now, and she struggled to keep her head tilted up.
“What kind of work?” she asked.
“Alchemy,” he answered.
She didn’t know what that was, but she nodded silently anyway, and he smiled.
“Alchemy’s quite straightforward,” he continued. “You’ll learn more about it, should you come on board. As a manager there, you would need to not only oversee production but coordinate directly with headquarters.” He leaned a little closer to her now. She was too nervous to move away. “I can only submit one candidate, but if you’re willing, I think you’d do well.”
He put a hand on her shoulder. Connie stiffened as she felt his fingers squeeze gently.Willing.Then she knew in a flash what he meant, and felt an immediate twinge of shame at her hesitation to turn him down.
Because she wanted it, a little bit.
“How,” she asked hoarsely, unable to resist asking, “much does it pay?”
His good-natured smile held. “The kind of money that will change your life.”
Could it be possible? Should she agree, she might at last find herself holding a ticket to the kind of future she had been promised here, a path into the dream that she held for herself and for her daughter. She had always told herself to be ready for the moment when it came. And maybe it had come; it was right here, offering her a chance—in exchange for a cost.
A cost. And she remembered the world she had stepped away from in the hopes that she was going toward something better. This could not possibly be it.
The sky outside was turning dark. She needed to get home to Sam.
The thought of Sam strengthened her resolve at last. She started to shake her head at Maclan, still reluctant to turn him down. “Can I,” she asked, “can I think about it?”
Now an impatient light came into his eyes. “What’s there to think about? I know you’ve been anticipating a promotion for months.”
She swallowed. Something still didn’t feel quite right, like she hadn’t exactly gotten his permission yet to refuse. “It’s just that, it’s so late in the day?” she said, her voice tilting up anxiously, turning her sentences into questions. “I don’t know how much longer I can be away from my daughter?”
She brought Sam up intentionally, remembering that Maclan also had a daughter, and looked at his face, hoping to find that camaraderie that might come with the shared experience of parenthood.
“Well,” he said, still towering over her, his voice turning disappointed. “Idon’t have a lot of time to assign this promotion. There are other candidates waiting.”
He was leaning too close to her chair. Now she felt a true twinge of danger at being alone with him in here. She decided to stand up, her body prickling with a rising panic. “Thank you, sir,” she said. Somehow, her voice stayed calm. “I need to get home to my daughter now, but I’ll think on it and let you know, first thing in the morning.”
She didn’t wait for him to answer this time. She just murmured her thanks a few more times, smiling with her face tilted down at the desk so that she didn’t have to look him in the eye anymore. He didn’t say anything. She took the opportunity to turn around and head toward the door. There were still some people working on all the floors—she knew the assistant was probably still outside, in the office next door, and would hear anything she said. Or shouted. She let this fact soothe her, calm her fluttering heart.
She reached the door. Her hand closed on the knob and turned.
Except it wouldn’t open.
“If you knew alchemy,” he said, “you’d know how to change that back.”
She tugged again. When it still didn’t open, she looked down, and realized in confusion that she was tugging not on a metal doorknob but on a knob of wood fused with the door, and that the door itself was a just a slab of wood fused to the wall.
When she turned around, she saw Maclan approaching her, trailing one of his hands along the wall.
She gathered her courage. “I’ll call the police,” she said, her voice trembling.
Maclan looked amused by her threat. “It’s difficult to convict an impossible crime, isn’t it?” he said. As he drew nearer to her, his other hand made a subtle gesture in the air. “But you’re right.” His words sounded funny this time, as if encased inside a bubble, like any sound they made now would be contained within the few feet separating them. “We don’t want to cause a commotion.”
Afterward, when she’d managed to stop shaking, she went home and found Sam alone in their bedroom, still inside the baby gate with all of her toys, wailing with hunger. Connie made Sam dinner, calmed her down, held her quietly and fed her, then bathed her and got her ready for bed. They reada book together. Sam said something delightful, and Connie summoned every reserve of joy in her body to smile for her little girl, trying not to think about why she was a bad mother, why everything had to be so hard. She curled her wounded body up in a ball around her daughter’s and hummed their favorite song. When Sam fell asleep and Connie finally got a moment to tend to herself, she rose and went to the shower, taking as long as she could, biting her fist so hard that it bled, scrubbing away the residue of him until the water ran cold.
The next day, she went back to work, because the rent didn’t care what had happened to her, it was still due on Friday. At some point, the assistant came up to the woman at the opposite station with a small white envelope. Connie listened as the woman read out loud the letter of congratulations, signed by Maclan, offering her the position of floor manager. Scattered applause followed from the rest of the floor. Connie clapped along.
She worked for two more weeks before she submitted her resignation letter. She did it carefully, wording it in ways that only praised Maclan’s support of her, saying that she appreciated deeply the way he had lauded her hard work and that she had been lucky to have such a thoughtful supervisor. She wished him all the best.
Then she handed the letter to the assistant and left work. She didn’t return on Monday.
