My old boss was asleep in the back armchair of the public library.
That firm cut me in 2019, after seventeen years there.
Clipped to her coat was MY badge.
I lost the house eight months after the layoff. Now I pick orders overnight at a warehouse off Route 9 and use the library printers because ink costs more than my phone bill.
“Angie, she’s here again,” Rob at the desk said. “Every Tuesday, same chair.”
Donna Kasten used to run our whole department. Corner office, framed photo of a boat I never once heard her talk about sailing.
I got close enough to see the number on the badge. 44127, faded blue, under a cracked plastic sleeve.
Same number.
I told myself the firm probably dumped a whole bin of old badges when they moved floors. But at four in the morning on the picking line I kept seeing that plastic sleeve.
The next Tuesday I sat two chairs down from her.
Her coat was held together at the pocket with a safety pin. She had a spiral notebook open on her knee, writing in columns.
Rob said she came in at ten and stayed until close and had never once asked him for anything.
That night I looked her up on my phone. One local business article from 2020. Donna Kasten, resigned amid an internal review.
So I messaged Pam from accounting, who I hadn’t talked to in five years.
Pam said Donna never resigned.
She was walked out.
“She wouldn’t sign something,” Pam wrote. “Nobody would say what it was.”
Two Tuesdays later, Donna was awake when I came in. She looked straight at me and said my last name like we still worked together.
“They handed me nine names in March,” she said. “Yours was on the list twice.”
Everything in my body went quiet.
“I TOOK YOUR NAME OFF TWICE. The third time they took my keys and my parking pass.”
She never turned in the badge she pulled out of the box for me.
Then she slid the notebook across the table, open to a page of names with one phone number circled in pen.
“Sit down,” she said. “The other seven still don’t know what happened to them, and one of them is the reason I can’t go home.”
What I Knew About Donna Kasten Before That Tuesday
Not much. That’s the honest answer.
You don’t really know the people above you. You know their habits and their moods and the way they take their coffee, but you don’t know them. Donna took hers black. She was in before anyone else and gone before most people noticed. She had a voice that didn’t raise itself to make a point. She didn’t need to.
Seventeen years I worked under her, indirectly at first and then directly the last four. She fought for my title bump in 2016. I know because Dave in HR told me, two beers in at the Christmas thing, the year they still did the Christmas thing at the Italian place on Clement. “Donna went to the mat for you,” he said. I filed it away and never mentioned it to her because that’s not how things worked there. You didn’t acknowledge the machinery.
She got the corner office in 2014. The boat photo went up the same week. Thirty-two footer, white hull, name I couldn’t read from the doorway. I assumed it was her husband’s. I don’t know why I assumed that. I never saw a husband.
I assumed a lot of things about Donna Kasten.
When the layoffs came in March of 2019, she called me into the small conference room, the one with the broken blind that always let in a stripe of parking lot. HR was there. A woman from legal whose name I never got. Donna sat at the end of the table and she didn’t look at me once the whole time. I thought she was ashamed of the process. I thought maybe she’d fought for me and lost. I walked out with a box and a severance packet and a handshake from the HR woman and nothing from Donna.
I was angry at her for four years.
Not the top-layer angry, the kind you talk about. The underneath kind. The kind that sits in your chest at four in the morning when you’re scanning bin locations and your feet hurt and you’re doing the math on whether you can make rent if the car needs anything before the fifteenth.
That kind.
The Notebook
I sat down.
Not because I wasn’t scared. I sat down because my legs decided before my brain did.
The notebook was a cheap one, the black-and-white composition kind, the ones that cost a dollar nineteen at the drugstore. She’d filled maybe forty pages. Columns of names, dates, dollar amounts. A few pages of what looked like org chart sketches, boxes and lines, some crossed out. Initials I didn’t recognize next to some of the dollar figures.
The page she’d opened to had nine names in a list. Mine was third. Next to each name: a date, a two-letter code, and a number. My date was March 14, 2019. My code was RF. My number was 44127.
The circled phone number was at the bottom of the page, written bigger than everything else. 312 area code. Chicago.
“That’s Renata Foss,” Donna said. “She was general counsel for eighteen months starting 2017. They walked her out six weeks before they walked me out.”
I didn’t know a Renata Foss. The name meant nothing.
“She’s the one who figured out what the codes mean.”
I looked at RF next to my name.
“That’s her,” Donna said. “She flagged you. Twice. I don’t know why you specifically. She flagged four of the nine more than once.”
My mouth was doing something but no words were coming out.
“RF isn’t her initials,” Donna said. “It stands for Reduction Flag. It’s a secondary scoring system they ran parallel to the official performance reviews. Nobody below director level knew it existed.”
What the Codes Actually Meant
Here’s what Donna had put together over three years of library Tuesdays.
The firm had a consulting arrangement, starting sometime in 2016, with a workforce optimization company based out of Atlanta. She had a printout of their website, clipped to the inside back cover of the notebook. The company’s name was something bland and forgettable, the kind of name that sounds like a vitamin brand. They built models. Salary against projected output, years to retirement, likelihood of filing certain kinds of claims, likelihood of organizing. Donna didn’t say that last one directly. She said “associative risk factors” and tapped the page with one finger.
The nine names on her list all had RF codes. All nine were gone within fourteen months of the codes being assigned.
Two of them had filed age discrimination complaints. Both complaints went nowhere. One was still tied up in arbitration as of the last time Donna had checked, which was eight months ago, before whatever happened that meant she couldn’t go home.
I asked her about that. She held up one finger. Not yet.
“The thing they asked me to sign,” she said, “was a certification. That the reduction process had followed standard HR protocol. That I’d reviewed the performance metrics and concurred with the selections.”
She looked at her hands for a second.
“I’d never seen those metrics. They showed them to me for the first time the day they asked me to sign. I had people on that list who I’d given commendations to eight months earlier. People I’d personally recommended for retention the prior year.”
She didn’t sign.
The second time they asked, they brought a different lawyer. She still didn’t sign.
The third time, they didn’t ask.
The Seven Who Didn’t Know
I asked her why she hadn’t contacted the others herself.
She was quiet for long enough that I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Then she said she’d tried. Two of them hadn’t written back. One had written back to say he didn’t want to be involved in anything. One had a new job and a new city and she got the sense from his message that the old job was a door he’d locked from the outside.
“Three of them I found,” she said. “We’ve talked. They’re on the list.”
The list she meant wasn’t the notebook list. There was a second list, folded inside the back cover. Six names, four phone numbers, two email addresses. Her handwriting was small and steady.
My name wasn’t on it yet.
She slid the loose page toward me.
“Renata Foss filed a whistleblower complaint in Cook County in February. It’s not public yet but it will be. She has the original contract between the firm and the consulting company. She has the model outputs. She has the names.”
I looked at the page.
“She needs declarations. People willing to put their names on paper and say what happened to them. The more of us, the harder it is to call it a coincidence.”
I thought about the house. I thought about Route 9 at two in the morning, the way the loading dock smells like cold rubber and the fluorescent lights have a hum you stop hearing after the first hour but it’s still there. I thought about seventeen years and a box and a handshake from a woman whose name I never got.
“Why can’t you go home?” I said.
The Reason She Keeps the Badge
She told me.
I’m not going to put all of it here because some of it isn’t mine to put here. But the short version is this: one of the nine names on the RF list belonged to a man named Curtis Webb, who’d been a senior analyst in risk management for eleven years. He’d been quietly building his own file on the consulting arrangement for months before the RF flag showed up next to his name. Not because he suspected what was coming. Because something in the numbers he was hired to look at didn’t add up, and Curtis Webb was the kind of person who noticed when numbers didn’t add up.
He was gone four months after the flag.
He reached out to Donna after she was walked out. They met twice. The second time, someone followed him from the parking garage to the coffee shop where they were meeting. He didn’t know who. He made Donna leave first and a different way.
Two weeks after that, Donna came home to find her apartment had been entered. Nothing was taken. Her laptop was moved. The notebook was in her bag, which she’d had with her. But someone had been there.
She’d been staying with her sister in Millbrook since October. Coming into the city on Tuesdays because the library was a public place with other people in it and Rob at the desk who noticed things.
“Curtis is the one who found Renata Foss,” she said. “He’s the one who made the connection to the Cook County filing.”
She said his name the way you say the name of someone you’re worried about. Not past tense. Present.
I asked if he was okay.
“He’s careful,” she said.
What I Said Yes To
I took a photo of the page with the six names and the phone number.
I texted Renata Foss that night from the warehouse parking lot, sitting in my car with the heat running, ten minutes before my shift started. I said Donna Kasten had given me her number and I was one of the nine and I wanted to know what putting my name on paper would actually mean.
She called me back in four minutes.
We talked for thirty-seven minutes. I was eleven minutes late clocking in. My supervisor, a guy named Dale who is not a bad person, gave me a look and I said I was sorry and I meant it and I scanned my first bin and I thought about RF codes and a consultant in Atlanta and seventeen years.
Renata Foss has a voice like someone who has explained complicated things to hostile rooms many times. She was clear about what the declaration would say and what it wouldn’t. She was clear about the risks, which are real but not the kind I’d been imagining in the parking lot. She said there were now eleven people on the list, not counting her. She said the filing would become public within sixty days, probably less.
She said, “I want to be honest with you. This may not get you your job back. It may not get you anything material. What it does is make the record true.”
I said that was enough.
I don’t know if I meant it when I said it. I think I did.
The next Tuesday, I got to the library at ten. Donna was already in the chair. She had two cups of coffee from the cart outside, one on each armrest, and she pushed one toward the seat next to her when she saw me come through the door.
I sat down.
She was still wearing the badge. I didn’t ask her to take it off. I don’t think I’m going to.
—
If this one’s sitting with you, pass it along to someone who’s been counting their years somewhere and wondering if any of it mattered.
If you’re looking for more wild tales, you might also enjoy reading about My Wife Left a Note in Her Bible Before She Died. I Wasn’t Supposed to Find It Yet. or even My Job Interview Was Interrupted By a Biker Who Knew My Dead Father’s Name. We’ve also got a story about I Found a Stack of Business Cards in My Best Friend’s Bag. My Name Wasn’t on Them. that you won’t want to miss.
