Daniella scanned another line of sales. She’d been keeping the books for a while. She had a copy that she sent in for Archer Junior’s review and she had the copy that was kept in this notebook in the break room. She started with this year’s numbers, and even in six months, things were not looking good. But they weren’t the worst sales she’d ever seen. Along the margins, there were the little notes Imogen had written by hand.

Customer requested When We Were Us. That was dated from just a few months ago.

Eight customers were looking for books by Jonathan Gold. That had just been last week, Daniella remembered seeing it. At the time she had guessed that everyone had read the same think piece or posthumous profile. It was too much of a coincidence otherwise.

Customer returned asking for When We Were Us update.

There was something about these requests, the simple human annotation of them among all the numbers. Daniella couldn’t believe the store was closing.

But numbers didn’t lie. And the numbers were down. Daniella was just disappointed that she hadn’t figured it out herself. Math was one of those things—like poetry. Once she got into a flow, Daniella could practically keep going until infinity. It didn’t make sense that she’d miss something so huge.

Daniella pulled her own notebook out from under the ledger. She didn’t normally do this, but she wanted to check something. She started scribbling the distribution curve. Started seeing where the pattern fell. It took a minute, but everything checked out. Everything seemed normal. There were rules about the way that numbers were supposed to be distributed in groups. Rules that a person couldn’t fake, not really. Those were holding with basic numeric distribution principles.

What had happened?

The sales were down, overall, but not dire. Just a steady, slow slide. Daniella looked around the room. Behind Jo’s desk was a whole set of shelves. In the middle of the shelves was a row of binders. In front of her was Jo’s laptop, whirring quietly, its blinking light beckoning her in.

Daniella knew she wasn’t supposed to touch the laptop. But she also knew that she needed answers and that was the fastest likely route to them. She typed in thebatman as the password, because that had to be Jo’s password. Jo complained about “the Batman” being the focus of the “Batfam” comics at least once a week. Also, it was the Wi-Fi password. There wasn’t another master password that Jo could possibly use.

The password was correct. But all that there was on Jo’s desktop was a shortcut to her email. Daniella clicked around for a bit, trying to find a document file that might provide her answers, but there was nothing. Not even in the documents folder.