The meeting hummed along with the usual low-stakes cadence of marketing syncs, punctuated by the click of slide transitions and Sarah gesturing brightly toward the wall-mounted display. Ryan kept his face smooth, resting his chin on one hand while his thumb brushed against the hidden bulge of the Apex invoice tucked beneath his notepad. He forced himself to nod at the appropriate intervals, tracking the projected Q4 stock allocations for the new citrus-sparkling line as if nothing else in the world mattered. Yet every instinct he possessed was humming with quiet, erratic static, torn between the mundane spreadsheets on the screen and the chilling paper trail building inside his bag.
As Sarah handed out stapled sets of regional budget breakdowns to circulate around the beechwood table, one copy landed neatly beside Ryan's elbow. Glancing down to push it toward the colleague next to him, his eyes snagged on a stray margin note scrawled in thick, black ink near the bottom corner. It was a neat, slightly hurried mathematical adjustment alongside a cryptic shorthand code—M-04 cross-reference—written in a distinctive, sharp-angled script he had practiced since his school days in Chiba. It was unequivocally his own handwriting. A cold prickle of disbelief washed over him; he had never so much as laid eyes on Sarah's working draft, let alone taken a pen to it, yet there his own hand was, neatly annotating documents behind his own back.
Sarah didn't seem to notice, pressing on cheerfully about promotional spend allocations and influencer gifting tiers as the rest of the pod murmured in agreement. Ryan swallowed hard, his throat tight, and slowly pulled his gaze away from the margin note. He picked up his ballpoint pen, his fingers trembling ever so slightly against the smooth plastic, and forced himself to write a standard, innocuous note about point-of-sale displays onto his own pad—matching the stroke, the angle, the pressure, watching his hand replicate the ghost that was already haunting the room.