The digital clock in the corner of Ryan’s monitor clicked over to precisely 7:00 PM, casting a quiet, lonely glow across an otherwise deserted marketing pod. The hum of the central air conditioning had dropped to a low, hollow thrum, and the cleaning crew was still two floors down, leaving the fifth floor in a state of suspended twilight. Ryan methodically shut down his laptop, clicked his ballpoint pen twice, and slid it into the front pouch of his canvas messenger bag.
As he stood up and leaned his weight against the edge of the laminate desk to slide his chair in, his hand brushed against a small, ordinary detail he had somehow never noticed before in his three years at the office. Right beside the plastic cable grommet, worn deep into the particleboard surface, was a neat, perfectly circular depression about the size of a coin. It had no label or asset tag; it was simply a smooth, pale indent where countless hours of absentminded tapping or heavy leaning had slowly reshaped the cheap office furniture.
Ryan paused for a quiet, lingering second, his thumb tracing the shallow hollow under the harsh flicker of the overhead fluorescents. It was a tiny, inconsequential ghost left behind by someone who had sat at this exact desk long before him. Shrugging on his charcoal coat, he turned off his desk lamp, shouldered his bag, and headed down the dim corridor toward the elevators to catch the T9 back to Rhodes.