Chapter 8 - The Weight of the Past
That evening, long after the trading floor had emptied and the cleaning carts had finished their rounds, I remained alone in the corner office.
The city lights of Manhattan twinkled against the night sky like a vast constellation of digital stars, casting a warm amber glow across my desk.
I pulled a small, worn photograph from the bottom drawer of my desk—a picture of my mother and me taken back in Queens during the darkest months of my first life, when I was sitting in her basement subsisting on instant ramen while Julian Vance lived in a penthouse overlooking Central Park.
Looking at the photo now, the bitter, crushing weight of that memory didn't hurt anymore. It had lost its teeth. It was just data—a past iteration of a broken system that had been permanently corrected, patched, and secured.
The door to my office clicked open.
Sarah Chen stepped inside, holding her jacket and keys. "Still here, Marcus? The cleaning crew is threatening to vacuum around your chair."
I smiled, sliding the photograph back into the drawer and standing up. "Just tying up the final audit logs for the week."
"Well, tie them up tomorrow," she laughed, heading for the door. "The entire analytics team is downstairs at the Irish pub on Vesey Street celebrating our first week of clean books. And as the Senior Managing Director of Risk, your attendance is technically a mandatory compliance requirement."
May you like
I grabbed my wool overcoat from the rack, slipping my arms into the sleeves.
"In that case," I said, walking out of the corner office and turning off the desk lamp behind me, "I wouldn't want to trigger a federal compliance violation."
