I don’t want to think that anything worse can happen to me. I’ve lost my wife, and people in the office have come one at a time to check in with me. The guy who routes our mail made a point of asking if he could help me with anything. It’s been nice. I know that there are decent people everywhere, but mostly on the levels far below my name on the org chart.

I admit that it’s hard to focus on work with distractions of the magnitude of a murdered wife, a police investigation, a father-in-law from hell, and a TV reporter who won’t go away. I read the comments on a story posted in the Seattle Times, and mostly they were about the mystery of who had taken my wife and if there had been other, comparable attacks. A poster from British Columbia wrote that they’d had a similar case up there: a student from the University of British Columbia was abducted in the middle of the day. Her body was found in the Fraser River. She’d been beaten, strangled, and raped.

Just like Sophie.

I think of the Canadian couple that found my wife’s body. They were connected to UBC somehow. I wonder if anyone else will think of that. I contemplate if I should call Lee or if inserting myself into the investigation in any way will only make things worse.

Carrie stops by. It’s almost noon.

“I’m off-site for the rest of the day, Adam.”

She lingers a bit, looking at me and then turning away.

“See you tomorrow,” I tell her.

“Okay,” she says, her voice trailing away from me. “Sounds good.”

The HR office is one building over from mine. I pack up my laptop and wave good-bye to the rest of my team and make my way through a warren of cubicles to the stairwell. It’s a little after four p.m. by the time I find myself in Tricia’s office. But we’re not alone. A man who identifies himself as Tricia’s coworker is there too. On the desk in front of her is a single sheet of paper, facedown.

This is not good. It’s not about beneficiaries.

“What the hell is going on here?” I ask, feeling my pulse starting to race.

“Can you calm down?” the jerk next to her says.

“Can you fucking tell me what’s going on here?”

“I’m sorry to tell you this,” Tricia says, “but we’re terminating your employment today.”

“Holy shit,” I say. “What for?”

“Can you tone down the language?” Jerk says.

I give him a hard look and then return my attention to Tricia and that paper. She slides it across her Titanic-size gray laminate desk.

“It’s all right here,” she says.