Page 168 of Only the Hunter

The corridor to my floor feels narrower than it used to. Not physically—just in the way a place can feel when it contains too much history. Too many moments you didn’t consent to carrying. My office door is exactly where it always was. The plaque with my name still catches the overhead light at the same angle.

I unlock it.

The first thing I see is my desk, tidy in the way it’s always tidy when I’m trying to control something bigger than paper.

The second is the empty space on the shelf where the Safe Passage binders used to sit—suppressed, removed, boxed, erased with procedural signatures that once felt final.

Now the shelf is waiting.

So am I.

I set my bag down, hang my coat on the hook by the door, and let my fingertips rest for a beat on the edge of the desk, grounding myself in something that doesn’t lie. Wood doesn’t gaslight you. A table doesn’t tell you you’re imagining a lock being picked.

I sit.

Open my laptop.

And the inbox loads like nothing ever happened.

The first email is a calendar update.

The second is a polite reminder about an overdue quarterly training module.

The third is marked URGENT and contains three lines that make the air in the room feel crisp.

SAFE PASSAGE PROJECT — ACTIVE

RETURNED TO THOMPSON

BRIEFING 10:00 / CONF ROOM 4B

I stare at it longer than I need to.

Not because I’m surprised.

Because I’m aware, suddenly, of how much I wanted to see it.

Triumph is loud, and my life has taught me to mistrust loud feelings. What I feel instead is something steadier—like the second you step back into a courtroom after a recess and the room is the same, but your posture isn’t.

I print the agenda.

I pull a yellow legal pad toward me.

And then I open the drawer that used to hold the suppressed version of the Morozova case.

It’s empty.

A clean absence.

I don’t know what I expected—an echo, maybe, the ghost of the file that lived there, the one I could never quite let myself stop thinking about—but it’s just an ordinary drawer and an ordinary morning, and I have to remind myself that this is what accountability looks like in real life.

Not dramatic.

Just procedural.

Just stubborn.

Before I stand, my phone lights up with a notification I don’t tap. A message thread with Gabe sits at the top—last night’s short exchange, his Copy still there like a marker on the map.