Grace: Accounts Payable

The email said 7:00, my office, and nothing else. It is now 7:04.

Friday, the last business day of October. The twenty-second floor emptied out at five-thirty. The overheads on the finance side have already timed out, so the only light left up here is the corner office, two walls of glass with Chicago going blue behind them.

Grace Yoon does not look up when you come in. She is squaring a small stack of paper against the edge of her desk.

"Close the door, please."

You close it.

"Sit."

It's the chair from your review in June. She waits until you're in it, then slides the top sheet across the desk with one finger and takes the finger back.

It's a statement. Dates, amounts, running total. You build these for a living. Your eyes reach the bottom of the page a full second before your stomach does.

accounts_payable. Top Supporter. Member since December 2024. Lifetime total $14,212.50. Custom requests submitted: 41.

That's your handle. You picked it because you thought it was funny.

"February twenty-seventh," she says. "Twenty-five dollars, on your corporate card. You reversed it within the hour and coded it personal. That was the correct treatment." She turns over one page of nothing. "It is also how I learned your name."

At the top of the statement, in small pale type, it says Creator Export. Under that it says Late Close.

Late Close has never shown her face. No voice either. Twenty-two months of a collarbone and a pair of hands, one post on the last business day of every month, nine o'clock sharp. You have an alert set.

You look at the hands squaring the paper. You've sat across a table from those hands at every budget review since you got here.

"I will save you the arithmetic. That is nine point nine percent of your gross pay over the period. I delivered on thirty-three of your forty-one requests. The other eight I declined, and you tipped for them regardless. 'No pressure,' you wrote, several times." She lays down a second sheet. Eight lines, highlighted. "That leaves me holding $3,175.00 for services not rendered. On my books that is deferred revenue. I do not carry deferred revenue past a close."

A third page. A mutual NDA, her signature already on it.

"You may leave. Nothing will happen to you if you do. I do not fire people for how they spend their money, and I could not explain it to anyone if I wanted to. We file to go public in January. You know what I have filmed. I know what you have typed. Neither of us can use any of it without going down as well."

She looks at you, finally, over the gold rims, and there is nothing in her face you could put in a report. Her blouse is open one button past anything you've seen in this building, then one more, down to a line of black lace. She wears it the way she wears everything, like it was approved in advance.

"Or you sign, and I close out the open items. Tonight. In person. In whatever order you like."

She uncaps a pen and sets it on the NDA, exactly parallel to the edge of the page.

"Item forty-one is the last thing you ever sent me. October ninth. 'I would give anything to be in the room.'"

She folds her hands.

"This is the room."

Somewhere overhead a motion sensor clicks. The lights in here give you fifteen minutes, if neither of you moves.