It Wasn’t There Yesterday

The tab wasn’t there yesterday.

I noticed it at 4:40, closing out the Hartwell reconciliation. The workbook always has eleven tabs. Now it had twelve, the last one unnamed: Sheet12.

I almost deleted it. First, I checked the file properties, in case a coworker had made it. Created: 6:01 PM, today.

It was 4:40. I clicked the clock in the taskbar and it still said 4:40. I decided the system was syncing to a server in another time zone, and I told myself that was a normal thing for a system to do.

Dennis sat two desks over, eating almonds from a plastic bag.

“Did you add a tab to the Hartwell file?”

“No.” He didn’t look up from his phone.

“Then who did?”

“Glitch, probably. It’s a quiet afternoon. Nobody touches anything.”

“It’s quiet every day in this office.”

“Mhm, every day,” he agreed, and shook another almond into his palm. “You say that every time.”

Sheet12 held forty-one rows with four columns: name, amount, date, memo. The names meant nothing to me. Marguerite R. Tobias O. Anneliese C. The amounts ran from two to nine thousand dollars, and every line was billed to an account ending in 0417.

The dates were wrong, that I noticed. The first row was this coming Thursday, the second the Thursday after, and so on, one per week, forty-one weeks forward. Nobody schedules payments that far out. Accounts payable wants an invoice in hand, or the system kicks the entry back.

Then I read the memo column.

Each cell held a short note. Every period was followed by two spaces, the habit my mother drilled into me on her Smith Corona.

Row 1: Stop.

Row 2: Close the file. Go home.

Row 4: You really won’t listen, will you?

I always leave at five. I pride myself on it: coat from the brass hook, elevator, home in time to check Sarah’s homework. At 4:55 I reached behind my chair.

There was no hook. My fingers found a smooth, rounded ridge in the wall, where the hook should have been. I pulled my hand back. The firm had remodeled last month, I reminded myself. They were cutting costs everywhere.

A mug of tea sat by my keyboard with a skin on it. I don’t drink tea, but I took a sip of it anyway, since someone had gone to the trouble of making one for me.

I turned back to the screen and scrolled down.

Row 9: Sarah called. You should apologize for being short next time she sees you.

Row 14: You will want to call Sarah. She’s not a kid.

At 5:10 the total at the bottom of the Hartwell tab turned into #REF!. Then the subtotal above it did. Then every formula in the workbook went, one at a time, top to bottom, like someone checking doors. I pressed undo. Undo did nothing. The gridlines on Sheet12 began to lean, a degree at a time, until the rows ran downhill.

I widened column D so the memos would stop clipping. The font had changed from Calibri to something I didn’t recognize.

Row 17: The coat hook is gone. Don’t look for it again.

Row 24: Don’t argue about the steak.

Row 26: You don’t work there anymore.

I read that one twice. Then I looked up. Dennis was shaking another almond into his palm. The bag had been nearly empty at 4:40, and it was nearly empty now.

After that the room started losing things.

The ceiling panel over his desk went out. Then the one next to it. The vents, which had hummed all afternoon, cut off, and in the new silence I heard a slow beep from somewhere down the hall. The smell of lemon wax thinned, and something under it came up, something sweet and old, like a closed cupboard. A phone rang at an empty desk and kept ringing. Nobody came to answer it.

Far off, someone said my name. It was a long way away, and it wasn’t a question.

Row 30: I’m tired of being the one who knows.

Row 33: Whoever you are tonight, I’m sorry. This is the worst part. It passes.

I thought about the names. Marguerite R. had the desk by the copier. One Monday it was empty by lunch, and nobody said a word about it. Toby- Tob- T-Tobias O. sat by the window and shouted at the pigeons every morning until the day they came and walked him out. Anneliese C... Anneliese... Anne... Annie? Damn, I-I couldn’t place it.

For some reason, the payments felt less like payments and more like people who had gone, or nights I had spent here, entered by a woman who knew she would lose it by morning and couldn’t stop herself from keeping the books.

I scrolled to the bottom. Row 41 had my name. Claire M. The amount was nine thousand two hundred dollars. The date was Thursday, forty-one weeks away. The memo cell was empty.

Above it, the last few notes had changed.

Row 38: Let her have her own version.

Row 39: Stop trying to make her understand. Understanding is what costs her.

Row 40: Give her a yesterday. Make the first line gentle.

My chest clamped shut. Who had been in my machine? Who had written my name?

The room was suddenly much too hot. The beeping from the hallway wasn’t down the corridor anymore—it felt closer, right behind my ear, sharp and rhythmic, vibrating against the base of my skull. The monitor flared violently, the white cells burning into my retinas until my eyes watered.

It was past five. It was long past five.

Sarah was waiting at the curb in her winter coat, freezing, wondering where her mother was. I had to get to the elevator. I had to find the coat hook. But when I looked around, Dennis wasn’t Dennis—he was... he was a... blue... shape?

Then the spreadsheet began to tear. The column lines snapped like rubber bands, the numbers sliding off the edge of the monitor into black space. The Hartwell reconciliation was ruined. The whole year was out of balance. If I couldn't balance it, they wouldn’t let me leave.

I didn't make this tab, I thought, breath sawing in my throat, hot and sour. I didn't do this. I have to tell them I didn't do this.

My hands were shaking so hard I could barely find the keyboard. My knuckles were thick and swollen, the skin gray-brown and covered in dark spots like bruised fruit. No, they weren't my hands. None of this was mine.

I jabbed the mouse, the cursor skittering wildly, blindly, until it caught the empty cell in row 41.

I just needed to leave a note. An explanation for the audit. If I documented the error, it wouldn't be my fault. I could sign off. I could pick up Sarah. I could go home.

I hammered the keys with stiff, numb fingers, fighting through the glare, desperate to type out that the sheet was an accident, that it hadn't been here before, that the tab wasn't there yesterday, that I just... I needed... I needed to–

“Claire?”

A hand on my shoulder. Warm, large, straightening my collar.

A text file sat in front of me: forty-one lines of typing, and a title bar that said Claire’s notes. The lights were on. A whiteboard by the door read Thursday and, under that, Salisbury steak. The window was where it had always been, with the garden outside visible from here. What I had taken for a desk was a folding table, and the laptop on it was older than anything Hartwell had ever owned.

“Hey,” Dennis said. He wore scrubs and a lanyard, and he had a bag of almonds in his other hand. “You’ve been at it since four. It’s almost dinner.”

“Wait,” I said. “I’m not done.”

He leaned over my shoulder and read the last line. “That’s a good one,” he said. “Want me to save it?”

“Yes.”

“Same name as always?”

I looked at the title. Claire’s notes. Forty-one lines. I couldn’t have said who wrote them.

“Same name,” I said.

He pressed the key. The file closed and the screen went dark, and in the glass I noticed something I was never meant to see—or something I was meant to see, if only my mind could hold onto it: white-haired, thin, a plastic band on her wrist that read ‘RM-417’.

Then Dennis took my elbow. The hallway was warm and smelled of gravy, and I let him lead me there. By the time I sat down I had forgotten the screen. I remembered only that I had been working on something important, and that someone had left me a note.

Tomorrow, I would find it, because the tab wasn’t there yesterday.