The retirement was held in the large conference room on the fourth floor, with canapés and a view of the street below. Tal arrived forty minutes early, as her protocol required, and positioned herself at the back near the window. She had attended 340 events in eleven years. Retirement ceremonies were the most common by far.
Ola Brennan was sixty-four. She had worked in building regulation compliance for thirty-six years, which meant the ghost had been standing at her shoulder, unchanging, for thirty-six years. Tal had reviewed the case notes the night before. The split had occurred at twenty-eight, when Ola accepted a position she had not wanted, because the alternative felt worse. The ghost had not aged since.
Tal could see the ghost clearly from the moment Ola walked in. It stood two steps behind and to her left. Twenty-eight, in a coat Ola no longer owned. Attending its own retirement, or rather, attending the retirement of the woman who had taken the job it hadn't.
The speeches began at four o'clock. Colleagues stood and described Ola's steadiness, her institutional knowledge, her ability to remain calm under pressure. The ghost stood near the window and did not look at the speakers. It looked at Ola.
Tal noted this in her record. She noted the time. She noted that the ghost's expression was not grief. She had been doing this long enough to know the difference between a ghost grieving what it had missed and a ghost doing something else. This one was watching with the attention of someone tracking the health of a person they had been separated from for a long time.
At 4:47, Ola laughed at something a colleague said. The laugh was real, unperformed, the laughter of a woman who had given a significant portion of her life to something she had not chosen and had found, inside that unchosen life, genuine things to love. The ghost, at the sound of the laugh, turned toward the window. It stood like that for forty seconds. Tal wrote down the time.
At 5:14, Ola stood to receive a gift. The ghost moved to the vacated chair and sat in it. Forty seconds. Then the ceremony ended, and when Tal looked again, the ghost was gone.
She stood at the back of the room while Ola accepted congratulations and finished her notes in the particular handwriting she had developed for documentation: clear, without personal interpretation. The last line read: subject vacated chair 5:14. Ghost occupied for 40s. Ceremony closed. Ghost absent on check at 5:22.
She capped her pen. In the conference room behind her, Ola was still accepting congratulations. The chair at the end of the table was empty.