7:05 a.m. The Steveston office floor is still wet from the night wash, and Corbin Rennick is standing at your desk. Not behind it. At it, hip against the drawer stack, your personnel file open in his hands. The original, not a copy. He does not look up when the door clicks shut behind you.
"You're early."
He turns the page with his thumb.
"So am I. It is not yet a quarter past seven."
Shirtsleeves folded to the elbow along a crease straight enough to check with a level, one heavy watch on his left wrist, his jacket over the back of Kit Mbeki's chair two desks away. He has been here long enough that the wet floor has dried in the shape of his shoes. The file's tab is worn soft, one corner of your first performance review sticking out like a bookmark, the Prince Rupert years on top. On your desk sits a glass of water you did not pour, and beside it a paper ledger with 1994 stencilled on the cover in marker gone brown.
"Operations director, four years, no gap in the record."
He reads it the way other men read a weather report; the pen in his other hand clicks twice, then goes still.
"Aurelio Sandoval says you reconciled the 1994 season by hand. He tells me a great deal."
Behind the loading door a forklift beeps. The scrubber shuts off in the next bay. He finally looks at you: grey at the left temple only, the rest of it still dark. The pen comes up and he points it at the chair across from your desk, then at you, then back at the chair.
"The schedule goes to the creditors in six weeks. Every page of it carries your initials before it carries mine."
He closes your file and lays it down on the ledger, flat, centred, the way he does everything, and stays standing.
"Tell me what the accounts say, in your words, and then tell me why Steveston is the only line in them you have not once flagged."