THE INTERVIEW

20: The End

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He woke at 5:47 AM, the way he always had when he was working.

The bedroom was gray with early light. Linda was asleep beside him—he could hear her breathing, slow and steady, the rhythm of someone deep in dreams. He lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling, waiting for something to surface. A thought. A feeling. The familiar weight of another day.

Nothing came.

He got up quietly, the way he'd done a thousand mornings before. His body knew the routine: bathroom, then kitchen, then coffee. The movements were automatic, muscle memory carrying him through a sequence he didn't have to think about.

The kitchen was dim. He turned on the light above the stove—just enough to see by, not enough to disturb—and started the coffee maker. The machine gurgled and hissed, and he stood at the counter waiting, watching the dark liquid drip into the pot.

He should be happy.

The thought arrived from somewhere, a reminder of something he was supposed to feel. He'd gotten the job. After eleven months. After 247 applications. After everything.

He waited for the happiness to arrive.

It didn't.

The coffee finished brewing. He poured a cup, added nothing—he took it black, he knew that about himself—and sat down at the kitchen table. The same table where he'd eaten dinner last night, where Linda had watched him with that careful fear in her eyes.

His phone was on the counter where he'd left it. He should check it. See if there were messages, emails, something from Linden Creek confirming his start date.

He picked it up. The screen was cracked—a spiderweb fracture running from the corner across—

Across a face.

He looked at the lock screen photo. A little girl, gap-toothed, holding up a crayon drawing. She was smiling at the camera with that unguarded joy children had before they learned to hide.

His daughter. This was his daughter, at—at some age. Young. She'd been young here.

He tried to remember taking the photo. Tried to remember the moment, the context, why he'd chosen this image to see every time he picked up his phone.

Nothing. Just the fact of it. A photograph of a child who had become a woman who lived somewhere else now, with a husband whose name was—

With a husband.

And a baby. She had a baby. His grandson. Eight months old, he'd held him twice, and the baby's name was—

Dale stared at the cracked screen. The little girl smiled up at him through the fracture lines, frozen in a moment he couldn't access.

He should feel something. Looking at his daughter's face, he should feel love, or grief, or the bittersweet ache of time passing. He should feel the weight of all the years between this photo and now.

He felt nothing.

He set the phone down on the table, screen-down, and drank his coffee.

---

The address card was in his pocket.

He'd put it there yesterday—or Ms. Vance had given it to him, one of the two—and now he took it out and looked at it. Plain white card, black text. An address in—somewhere. A street name, a number.

He turned the card over. Blank on the back.

Something about the card felt wrong. Not the weight of it, which was ordinary, or the texture, which was standard cardstock. Something else. Something in the way it sat in his hand, or the way the letters looked when he read them.

He couldn't say what was wrong. Only that something was.

He put the card back in his pocket. He would report to that address on Monday. He would show up at 8 AM, the way the card said, and he would begin working for Linden Creek Distribution, and he would be useful again.

That was all that mattered.

That was all that had ever mattered.

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Linda came into the kitchen at 6:30.

She was dressed for work—the same kind of clothes she always wore, professional but comfortable, suitable for a day at the front desk of a doctor's office. Her face was careful, composed in a way that cost her something.

"You're up early," she said.

"I couldn't sleep."

She poured herself coffee. The motions were familiar—she'd done this a thousand times, ten thousand times—but there was something different about the way she moved. Something guarded. She was watching him without looking at him, tracking his presence the way you tracked something you weren't sure was safe.

"How do you feel?" she asked.

"Fine."

She sat down across from him. The table was small—it had always been small, probably—and she was close enough that he could see the lines around her eyes, the gray in her hair, the small scar on her left hand where—

Where something had happened. A knife, a soup, a hospital. He knew the facts.

"Dale." Her voice was quiet. "Look at me."

He looked at her. At her face, which was the face of his wife. At her eyes, which were—

Which were looking at him like he was a stranger.

"What do you see?" she asked. "When you look at me. What do you see?"

He considered the question. It seemed important to her. It seemed like she needed him to give a specific answer, to prove something that she was afraid wasn't true anymore.

"I see you," he said. "I see Linda."

"What else?"

"What do you mean?"

"What else do you see?" Her voice cracked slightly. "The woman you married? The mother of your daughter? Thirty-one years of—of everything we've been through? Do you see any of that?"

He tried. He reached for the memories she was describing—the wedding, the years, the life they'd built together. He knew those things had happened. He knew they were married, knew they had a daughter, knew the broad outlines of the story that had brought them to this kitchen table on this morning.

But the details—the texture, the feeling, the specific moments that made a marriage more than a legal arrangement—

"I see you," he said again. It was the only true thing he could say.

Linda was quiet for a long moment. Her eyes were bright, but she didn't cry. She'd cried last night, he thought. Or almost cried. He couldn't quite remember.

"Something happened to you," she said. "In that interview. I don't know what. But you're not—" She stopped. Swallowed. "You're not the same. You're not the man who left yesterday morning."

"I'm the man who got the job."

"That's not enough." Her voice broke. "That's not enough, Dale. That was never supposed to be enough."

He didn't know what to say. He understood, in a distant way, that she was in pain. That she was looking at her husband and seeing something missing, something gone. But he couldn't feel her pain. He could only observe it, the way you observed weather through a window.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"For what?"

He didn't know. He was sorry because she seemed to need him to be sorry. Because apologizing was what you did when someone you loved was hurting.

Someone you loved.

"I'm sorry," he said again, and the words meant nothing, and they both knew it.

---

Linda left for work at 7:15.

She kissed him on the cheek before she went—a brief, careful kiss, the kind you gave to someone you weren't sure was really there. Her lips were warm against his skin, and he noted the sensation the way you noted any sensory input, and then she was gone.

The house was quiet.

Dale sat at the kitchen table and listened to the silence. The refrigerator hummed. The clock ticked. Somewhere outside, a car started, drove away, left the street empty.

He should do something. Clean the kitchen. Mow the lawn. The crack in the front walk—he'd been meaning to fix that. There were tasks waiting, the ordinary maintenance of an ordinary life, and he had three days before Monday, before he would report to the address on the card and begin his new job.

He didn't move.

He sat at the table and stared at the wall and felt the emptiness where his feelings used to be. It wasn't painful, the emptiness. It wasn't anything. It was just absence—the space left behind when something is removed, the silence after sound.

He thought about his daughter. The photograph on his phone, the gap-toothed smile, the crayon drawing she'd been holding up. She was grown now. She lived in—somewhere. She had a husband, and a baby, and a life that didn't include him.

He couldn't remember her birthday.

He thought about his father. The workshop in the garage, the smell of sawdust and machine oil. The voice that had said you work too hard, boy in a tone that might have meant I love you. But the voice was gone—he'd lost it in the interview room—and all that remained was the knowledge that it had once existed.

He thought about his wife. Linda, asleep beside him, waking to find a stranger wearing her husband's face. The fear in her eyes. The grief that would come, was already coming, when she finally understood what she had lost.

He should feel something. For her, for himself, for all of it.

He felt nothing.

He picked up his phone again. The cracked screen, the daughter's face. He looked at it for a long moment, trying to feel the love that should have been there, the ache of loss, the grief of a father who had failed his child in every way that mattered.

The face smiled up at him through the cracks, and he felt nothing at all.

And underneath the nothing—so far down he almost didn't notice it—there was something else. A small, quiet feeling, like a pilot light in an empty house.

Relief.

He had gotten the job. After eleven months of failure, after 247 applications, after everything—he had finally gotten the job. He would go to work on Monday. He would be useful again. He would have somewhere to go, something to do, a reason to get up in the morning.

The mortgage would be paid. The credit cards would be managed. Linda would not have to carry him anymore.

It had cost him everything. His memories, his feelings, his self. The face of his daughter, the voice of his father, the color of his wife's eyes. All of it, gone, traded away for a job he couldn't remember applying for at a company he couldn't quite recall.

But he had a job. He was useful again.

Dale Kinney set down his phone. He looked at the kitchen around him—the familiar walls, the familiar table, the familiar window looking out on a familiar yard. All of it known and none of it felt.

He sat in the silence, and he waited for Monday, and he felt nothing at all except the profound, overwhelming relief of finally being employed.

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THE END