The Janitor of War

Chapter 2

The Hargrove Wing smelled different from the rest of Blackridge.

Not better, exactly — just more deliberate. The cleaning products were the same industrial brand Ethan used everywhere else, but someone had added a diffuser near the entrance that ran something cedar-adjacent and expensive. The carpet was a shade darker than the rest of the school. The light fixtures were recessed rather than mounted. Small distinctions, carefully chosen, that said this part of the building was paid for by someone specific without having to say it out loud.

Ethan worked the baseboards first. Always the baseboards in a room like this — donors looked down when they talked, and they talked a lot.

Through the open double doors, the breakfast was underway. Round tables, white linens, Blackridge's crest on everything that would hold an embossed seal. Principal Crane was working the room in the way he always did at these events — slightly breathless, slightly too eager, laughing half a beat after the punchline because he was always calculating whether to laugh at all.

Gerald held court at the center table.

Ethan kept his eyes on the baseboard and listened anyway. He had spent enough time in enough rooms to know that the way a man talked when he thought no one important was listening was the only version of that man worth knowing.

"—the security contract renewal is already drafted," Gerald was saying. "Aldous just needs to sign off. I've made it very easy for him to sign off."

Murmured approval from the table.

"And the new systems are better. Integrated. Everything talks to everything else." Gerald paused to accept a coffee refill without acknowledging the server who provided it. "That's what Blackridge needs. Infrastructure that matches its reputation."

Ethan moved the brush along the corner joint. Integrated systems. New security vendor, then. He'd seen the preliminary paperwork two weeks ago in Crane's outgoing tray — a company called Veridian Solutions. He'd looked them up on the school's administrative terminal during a late maintenance check. Their website was four months old. Their registered address was a mail forwarding service in Delaware.

He hadn't mentioned it to anyone.

He filed it now under Gerald and kept working.

Jake found him twenty minutes later in the side corridor.

This was unusual. Jake did not seek Ethan out — their interactions were opportunistic, conducted in passing, Jake landing something and moving on before the silence could become a conversation. Seeking required intention. Ethan noted it.

"My father wants the east conference room opened up after breakfast," Jake said. "Apparently your colleague lost the key."

"I'll take care of it."

Jake didn't leave. He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, watching Ethan collect the equipment. The posture was performance — casual, unbothered — but his weight was forward, not back. He was paying attention.

"How long have you worked here?" Jake asked.

"Five years."

"Same mop?"

Ethan looked at him.

Jake shrugged. "Just asking."

"What are you actually asking, Jake?"

Something shifted in the younger man's face — a flicker of something that wasn't the usual amusement. He covered it quickly. "Dad says the outsourcing goes through the board next month. Thought you should know."

"Your father mentioned it this morning."

"Yeah, well." Jake pushed off the wall. "Figured it's different hearing it from someone who isn't enjoying telling you."

He walked back toward the wing before Ethan could respond.

Ethan stood with his equipment cart and looked at the empty corridor for a moment. Then he unlocked the east conference room, propped the door, and went to find the replacement key.

He ate lunch alone, the way he always did — supply room 2-B, which had a folding chair he'd placed there eighteen months ago and which no one had ever moved or questioned. Twelve minutes. A sandwich Diana had packed that morning, an apple, water. He didn't use his phone at lunch. He used it to think.

The camera. The locker. The delivery man's lanyard. Veridian Solutions. Integrated systems.

Each item sat in its own column. He was not yet connecting columns. That was the mistake most people made — connecting too early, forcing a shape onto things before the shape had earned itself. He had learned patience the way most people learned it, which was by surviving the cost of impatience.

His radio crackled. "Cole, we've got a spill outside the gym. Someone's pride, by the looks of it." That was Donnelly, the other maintenance staffer — a retired bus driver from Baltimore who found the students hilarious in the way only someone with no investment in them could. Good man. Noticed nothing.

"On my way," Ethan said.

He folded the wax paper from his sandwich, put it in his pocket, and stood up.

Through the small supply room window — ground-level, looking out at the faculty parking lot — he saw something that made him stop.

Gerald's car was still there. The breakfast had ended forty minutes ago. Gerald had no board meeting today; Ethan knew the board calendar better than most board members did. The two men who'd flanked Gerald on the way in were standing by the car. They weren't talking. They weren't on their phones. They were just standing — the particular stillness of men who were waiting without wanting to look like they were waiting.

Twelve seconds, Ethan watched them. Then he picked up his radio and his equipment and went to deal with the gym.

He was re-waxing the main corridor at 4 p.m. when Diana appeared at the far end of the hall.

She wasn't supposed to be here — the breakfast had been Gerald's event, not hers, and she'd mentioned that morning she had a call at two. He watched her walk toward him with the particular set to her shoulders that meant she'd had a version of a conversation she hadn't wanted to have.

She stopped beside him. Didn't look at him directly, which meant they were still on school grounds and she was still calculating how things appeared.

"He's going to push the contract vote up," she said quietly. "Two weeks, not four."

Ethan kept the mop moving. "Okay."

"Ethan."

"Diana."

She looked at him then. The blue coat again, collar turned up slightly from the cold she'd walked in from. Her eyes did the thing they did sometimes — searching for something in his face that she couldn't name but kept looking for anyway.

"Does it bother you?" she asked. "Any of it."

He thought about the camera angle. The locker scratch. The two men standing very still in a parking lot.

"I'm exactly where I need to be," he said.

It was the most honest thing he'd said all day. She didn't know that. She nodded slowly, the way she did when his answers didn't quite fit the question but she'd decided to let it go.

"I'll see you at home," she said.

He watched her walk back toward the entrance. At the door she paused — almost turned around — then pushed through into the afternoon cold.

Ethan looked down at the corridor floor. Even strokes, left to right. The light was already changing, going amber through the east windows.

He had twelve days before Gerald's vote went through.

He thought: that's enough time.

He went back to work.