Three, Two, One, I'm Gone novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Opal's Table

At ten o'clock Wade handed me a badge, a laptop and a list of forty-one open freight claims.

He did not mention Grant's name again.

I told myself I had imagined the coffee.

By Wednesday the office had stopped staring at me.

By Thursday I had learned which printer worked, and that the twelfth floor ran on gossip.

On Friday an old woman walked off the elevator with a cane and a pearl earring in each ear.

She stopped at my desk and rapped the leg of it with the cane.

"You're the girl who took the brooch back," she said.

I looked around the room.

Everyone had gone very busy with their screens.

"I'm sorry?"

"The video. My grandson's assistant showed it to me." She said it flatly. "Forty seconds on the steps. Anyone who has stood on steps knows what the other thirty-nine minutes looked like."

I had no answer to that.

"I'm Opal," she said. "Get your coat."

"I have claims to file."

"Then file them at lunch."

Wade stuck his head out of his office at the end of the floor.

"Gran. She's on a deadline."

"She's on my deadline now," Opal said, and walked me to the elevator with her cane tapping.

His grandmother, then.

He raised both hands at me over her head, apologizing, and I tried not to laugh.

The restaurant was a block away and Opal had a table by the window that nobody else was allowed to sit at.

She ordered for both of us without asking and told me to eat the bread.

"Seventy-four years old," she said. "I am done being polite to people I don't like. So I'll ask you the rude questions straight. What did he do?"

"Who?"

"The man on the steps."

I put the bread down.

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