Something Moved

The fourth drawer of Jo’s filing cabinet was not quite flush on Monday morning, and it was the kind of thing nobody else in the office would have noticed, because nobody else measured a drawer’s closure by the sound it made rather than by whether it looked shut. She stood in front of it a full minute before she touched anything, the way she stood in front of everything before she touched it.

Nothing was missing. She went through the Grey file twice to be certain — the eighteen-month gap, her private notes on the export licence, the printed transparencies from the first visit, all of it present, all of it in the order she had left it, except that the order was not quite the order she had left it in, the way a room tidied by someone trying to be careful was never actually the room it had…