A pause. Ryan could hear a keyboard in the background, someone laughing in the hall, the ordinary sounds of an office that would continue without him.

“She asked me a question,” Dennis said slowly, “that I wasn’t expecting. She asked whether you gave credit to your team. In your work here. And I realized I couldn’t answer. So I went back through some files.”

“Dennis—”

“The Midlands rerouting project. The one you presented to the executive committee in March. I always assumed that was your design. But the original spec was written by Tamsin Okoye, on your team. I found her draft in the archive. It’s dated six weeks before your presentation.”

Ryan sat very still.

“I’m not saying anything yet,” Dennis said. “But I need to talk to HR, and I need to talk to Tamsin. And I think, for now, it would be best if you stayed home. Paid, of course, while we sort it out.”

“I see.”

“Ryan.” The voice softened. “I liked working with you. I thought you were the best strategist I’d ever had. I just wish I’d looked closer.”

“So do I,” Ryan said.

He ended the call and set the phone gently on the desk, as if it might break. Out the window, a gray pigeon was walking along a ledge. It walked with great determination to the end, turned around, and walked back.

He thought about Tamsin Okoye. A soft-spoken woman in her late twenties, with thick glasses and a habit of tucking her pen behind her ear. He had given her a quarterly bonus in January and called it a “team recognition.” He remembered her smile, which had been small and uncertain, and the way she had looked at him in the elevator the day after the presentation. He had thought it was admiration.

He understood now that it might have been something else.

He looked at the pigeon. It had stopped at the edge of the ledge and was looking at him through the glass, head tilted, with one orange eye.

“Yeah,” Ryan said to it. “I know.”

The Number 79

Three days later, Ryan sold the car.

He did not announce it to anyone. He simply drove it to the dealership on a Thursday afternoon, handed over the keys, signed a stack of papers with a hand that no longer shook, and walked out with a check that barely covered the early termination fee. The salesman, a cheerful man with a gap in his teeth, asked whether he was sure.

“I’m sure,” Ryan said.

“Most people don’t give up a car like that unless something happened.”

“Something happened.”

He walked three blocks to a bus stop, a metal shelter with a cracked panel and a map faded almost to white, and stood in a line of people who were not looking at him. A young mother with a stroller. A man in a delivery vest. An old woman with a shopping cart folded under one arm. The wind off the lake was sharp, and he turned up the collar of a coat that suddenly felt too thin.

The Number 79 arrived eleven minutes late, hissing to a stop. The doors folded open. The driver, a heavyset woman with reading glasses on a chain, nodded without really looking.

Ryan had not ridden this route in nineteen years.

He paid the fare, found a seat near the back, and watched the city slide past the window, the glass towers thinning into brick storefronts, and the brick storefronts thinning into the long low streets of the south side, where the buses ran late and the streetlights ran out. It was strange how much of it he remembered. The laundromat with the green awning. The church with the hand-painted sign. The corner where a boy named Marcus had once taught him how to throw a punch.

At the eighty-first stop, he got off.

His parents’ house stood where it had always stood, a narrow two-story with white siding that needed paint and a small front porch with a wooden swing. His mother had planted marigolds along the walk, brown now with the first frost. He climbed the steps. Before he could knock, the door opened.

“Ryan,” his mother said.

She was smaller than he remembered. That was the first thing. She had always been a short woman, but now she seemed to have settled, folded inward, her gray hair pinned up in a loose twist. She wore a faded cardigan and a pair of slippers, and her eyes, dark and shrewd and lined at the corners, took him in at a glance.

“You didn’t call,” she said.

“I know.”

“You look terrible.”

“I know.”

She stepped aside. “Come in. There’s soup.”