The bins told me what I needed to know.

Full on Mondays usually meant something went wrong on Friday. This week they’d been full since Monday.

I pushed my cart past the workstations, past the conference room, past the kitchen where the same rings had been sitting on the counter since Tuesday. I wiped them. They’d be back by afternoon.

Eleven years and the counter still does that.

Thomas D.’s desk is in the corner with the glass wall. Nobody left things on it. Other people checked the clock. In this office, they checked whether his chair had moved. I’ve worked in offices where the important desk was in the middle. Here it was in the corner. Same difference.

On the desk, same position every morning — a water bottle. Transparent. Measurement marks running up the side. Not printed on. Built into the plastic itself. You can see them straight on. From other angles, they’re harder to find.

I don’t touch it. Not my place.

I’ve worked in other offices before this one. A building on the fourth floor that isn’t there anymore. A law firm where the partner’s bin was full every Monday for six years, until one Monday it wasn’t. A recruitment firm where people stopped coming back from lunch on Fridays and nobody said anything about it.

I’ve learned not to need an explanation.