Corporate Espionage in Aisle 4

Elena adjusted her fedora, feeling ridiculous in the fluorescent-lit breakroom of Precision Pharmaceuticals. She wasn't a spy. She was a senior accountant who'd started watching Theodore from accounting because he'd started leaving at exactly 3:47 PM every Tuesday and Thursday.

The vitamin supplements on his desk had shifted排列—first Vitamin D, then B-complex, then some unmarked orange bottles she couldn't identify. He'd lost weight. His eyes had developed that haunted quality she recognized from three years ago, when her mother stopped eating and started disappearing into hospitals.

Today she followed him to the pet store two blocks from their office building. Through the window, she watched him purchase a single goldfish—fat, orange, undeniably ordinary. He carried the bagged fish back to the office, not to his car, not to his home. To the rooftop garden where they all took their smoke breaks.

Elena followed, hat pulled low against the prying eyes of security cameras. She found him sitting on a bench, the goldfish bag floating beside him in the fountain's artificial pond.

"You're not very good at this," Theodore said without turning around.

Elena froze. "At what?"

"Being inconspicuous." He finally faced her, and she saw it—that look she'd been seeing every morning in her own mirror. "I'm not having an affair, if that's what you're hoping. I'm not selling company secrets. I'm not laundering money."

"Then what?" Elena demanded, though she already knew. She could hear it in his voice.

"My wife left last month." Theodore released the goldfish into the fountain. "This was her fish. I've been coming here because I can't figure out how to tell our daughter that Mom's never coming back, and I thought maybe... maybe if I set the fish free, it would somehow fix something."

The goldfish swam once around the bag, then vanished into the murky water.

Elena sat beside him on the bench. She thought about her own husband, asleep in their bed right now, the distance between them measured in missed anniversaries and unspoken grievances. She thought about the vitamins in her own purse—iron, calcium, things she took because she was afraid of becoming her mother.

"Does it work?" Elena asked quietly. "Letting things go?"

"No." Theodore stood, adjusting his tie. "But it's something to do on Tuesday afternoons."

Elena watched him return to the building, his shoulders slightly less bent than before. She stayed by the fountain, watching the goldfish surface once, then disappear again beneath the water, carrying secrets it would never tell.