Though one day he’d be known as The Venerable and, later, The Blessed, on this day he was just Frank. He was about as exhausted and dejected as a “just Frank” could be. He shifted in the hard wooden chair and his sore, protesting lower back reminded him of just how long he’d been sitting there, staring at nothing. Hours. Man, he thought, these chairs are torture devices, and he considered whether he should request something more comfortable to accommodate the rare client who needed to sit across the desk from him, rather than on the plush couch at the far end of the office where he conducted his therapy sessions. Who was he kidding? If he went ahead with what he was planning, he wouldn’t have any clients to accommodate. He wouldn’t have an office.

           He had been sitting in a guest chair, rather than his usual, more ergonomic perch on the other side of the desk, because it was closer to the locked filing cabinet. As he had done several times since he had taken this seat in the pre-dawn hours, he reached his hand toward the cabinet, then drew it back. Daylight had been steadily strengthening, and now it forced its way through the slats in the cheap blinds covering the window. Soon other people who worked in the building would be arriving, and he would need to figure out how to hide his despair and get through the day.

           Frank ran his hand over his jawline, feeling the salt-and-pepper stubble that had sprouted there since he had shaved yesterday morning. The tops of his cheeks were sticky with dried tears, and the skin around his eyes felt swollen and tight. He hadn’t returned home after the police had patted him kindly on the back and told him he could leave—that they would take it from there. Instead he had come straight to the office. To what was in the filing cabinet. To do what he should have done years ago.

           He’d woken in the night after having a vicarious dream. It was the second time in his life this had happened. Like the first time, there had been no mistaking it for something from his own subconscious. It was completely foreign, but vivid with detail, immediate. Also like the first time, the consciousness his dreaming self inhabited was female, the same female, in fact, although she was now a woman rather than a girl. Same agony, though. Same confusion and hopelessness. As it had decades before, experiencing her pain spurred Frank to action. He had leaped out of bed, accessed his client database to find her address, and rushed to her apartment as quickly as his shitty pickup could get him there. Though he had hoped against hope, his dream had, once again, revealed to him the truth. She was already dead by the time he got there. And so he had called the police and wept disconsolately while he waited for them to arrive.

           At some point during the hours he had occupied the wooden chair, his weeping had ceased. The well of his tears, but not of his grief, had run dry. 

           “Right,” he said as he stood decisively, forcing his stiff legs to straighten and waiting out the pins and needles. He removed the keychain from his pocket and found the match to the filing cabinet. He slipped the key into the lock of the bottom drawer, and pulled it open. Pushing the files forward, he felt for the small black box in the rear corner, wiping dust off of it with his hand, then turning the combination dial right, then left, then right again, hearing the faint click as the last of the tumblers slid into place.

           He reached into the small safe and removed the only item it contained—an obsolete hard drive that was almost comically oversized in comparison to minuscule, modern USB drives. Frank placed the drive into the manila envelope on which he had written “Tavis” with a thick Sharpie. Now that it had come out of the safe, he could not return the hard drive to its hiding place. The die had been cast, and he would give the envelope to Tavis the next time he saw him.

           As if on cue, a loud knock on the door shattered the silence of the office.