Three messages from someone named Darren. Work stuff, mostly. Project timelines, a shared complaint about their manager. The last one said miss you at the office, it's dead without you lol.
She read them on the bus, thumb hovering. She'd been gone eleven days. Darren had been on paternity leave when she submitted her resignation, and apparently nobody had thought to mention it.
The first message assumed she was swamped. The second assumed she was in meetings. The third assumed she was still there at all, just quiet, just heads-down on something, and in a way that was the kindest reading anyone had given her silence in years.
She typed hey and deleted it. Typed Darren I should tell you something and deleted that too. Not because the news was hard to deliver but because every version of it ended the version of her that was still at her desk, still reachable, still someone whose absence registered as unusual.
The bus turned onto Vine and she locked her phone. Outside, a man was watering a strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb — city property, technically, but someone had planted marigolds in it, and he was tending them like they were his.
She'd tell Darren tomorrow. Or he'd find out on his own, the way you find out most things — not from the person it happened to, but from the silence that forms where they used to answer.