Read Chapter 9: The Ghost

The pile had grown teeth.

Jazz noticed it on Tuesday, four days after Alex’s visit, when she went looking for the tenancy agreement to check their notice period. The drawer in the kitchen where she kept paperwork was jammed, and when she yanked it free, a stack of envelopes slid out and fanned across the floor like a losing hand of cards.

She knelt. Circulars, bank statements, a thick manila envelope from something called “Harrington & Cole Solicitors.” All addressed the same way:

*Priya Patel, Flat 3B, 14 Ellison Street, London*

Jazz turned one over. The postmark was from September. Another from October. A third, just last week. The solicitor’s envelope had been opened once and then resealed with a strip of yellowing tape that had peeled at the edges.

“Tom,” she called. “Have you seen this?”

He appeared in the doorway, hair still damp from his morning shower, a USB stick dangling from his fingers. “Seen what?”

She held up the stack. “Mail for someone who doesn’t live here.”

Tom crossed the kitchen and took the top envelope. His brow furrowed. “Priya Patel. Is that the previous tenant? The landlord said she moved out in August.”

“Enumeration forms, a water bill, demand letters.” Jazz tapped the solicitor’s envelope. “And this one looks legal. What landlord doesn’t forward legal mail?”

“A landlord who can’t be bothered.” Tom dropped the envelope back on the pile. “We’ve got bigger problems. I think I found the bug.”

Jazz’s head snapped up. “You’re kidding. The scheduling logic?”

“The worker pool allocation. It’s a race condition—two hosts pulling from the same queue at the same millisecond. Davis hits the booking at exactly 6 PM, both requests fire, and the system double-assigns.” He held out the USB stick. “I patched it. Want to see?”

She wanted to. God, she wanted to. Davis’s booking was in four hours, and for the first time in days, Tom sounded like himself—not the hollowed-out version who’d stared at his code the night Alex left.

“Give me five minutes,” she said. “I want to drop these at the letting agent’s office.”

“Jazz.” Tom’s voice carried an edge she recognized. “We don’t have five minutes.”

“The bug took you three days to find. Five minutes won’t kill it.”

“And if it does?”

“Then it wasn’t fixed anyway.” She was already pulling on her jacket. “I’ll be back before you’ve finished testing. Coffee’s on.”

The letting agent’s office was a two-minute walk from the flat, wedged between a vape shop and a halal butcher on the high street. The man behind the counter was maybe sixty, with a comb-over and the resigned air of someone who’d spent four decades explaining damp to people who didn’t want to hear about it.

Jazz set the mail on the counter. “This came for the previous tenant. Priya Patel. Do you have a forwarding address?”

The landlord—Mr. Humphries, his nameplate read—glanced at the envelopes and sighed. “She never gave us one.”

“She moved out in August. This is four months of post, including something from a solicitor.”

Humphries picked up the manila envelope, turned it over, set it down. “Patel was a problem tenant. Rent always late, started subletting without permission. We served notice in July; she left owing two months.”

“She didn’t claim her deposit?”

“Deposit?” The word came out like a laugh. “She never paid one. Moved in on a special rate, had her own insurance. When she left, she just… went. We had to rekey the locks on the strength of her word that she’d vacated.”

Jazz studied him. Something itched at the back of her neck. “Why would someone walk away from their own mail? Their legal mail?”

Humphries shrugged. “People do strange things when they’re leaving a mess behind.” He pushed the envelopes back toward her. “Not my problem anymore. You want, you can bin them.”

Jazz walked back to the flat with the mail still in her hands, the solicitor’s envelope burning against her fingertips. She should toss it. The previous tenant was not her business. Priya Patel had skipped out on rent, left her post to rot in a drawer, and vanished into whatever life she’d chosen. Jazz had enough to worry about without adopting a ghost’s paperwork.

But she didn’t toss it.

She set the stack on the shelf above the radiator, half-hidden behind a stack of their own unopened bills. Their *own* pile had grown too—two red letters from the energy company, a reminder from the council tax office, and the one she’d been avoiding for a week: a bank statement she was too ashamed to open.

Tom was hunched over his laptop when she came in, tapping furiously. He didn’t look up.

“Patched?” she asked.

“Compiled clean. Running a simulation against Davis’s booking pattern now.” He gestured at the screen. A progress bar crawled toward 100%. “If this passes, we’re good. The dynamic buffer kicks in automatically. Forty-six seconds after onboarding, the system reassigns—”

“Tom.”

He stopped. She rarely used his name. They’d existed for eight weeks in a state of constant correction, each knowing the other’s name but rarely needing it, because there was never any question of who was in the room.

“What?”

“The mail. Priya Patel.” She sat on the arm of the sofa, the manila envelope in her lap. “The landlord says she left without a deposit. Without forwarding anything. He didn’t even check the flat before we moved in.”

“So?”

“So, we’re living in a space that was abandoned. She just vanished.” Jazz turned the envelope over. “And this was opened. Someone read it and resealed it. That’s not standard junk mail.”

Tom’s face flickered. “You opened it?”

“No. It came like that. The same way it sat in the drawer for four months.” She held it out. “You don’t think that’s strange?”

“Jazz.” He pushed back from the desk. “I think we have a live customer booking in three hours, a patent we haven’t filed, a fake pricing tier we presented to an investor, and five days before Marcus’s update goes out. If I had any spare anxiety to spend on a stranger’s mail, I would, but I don’t. OK?”

His voice wasn’t cruel. Just tired.

She set the envelope down. “OK.”

They both turned to the screen. The progress bar had stalled at 87%, the simulation frozen on a frame that showed Davis’s booking queue with a single host assigned. Clean. For now.

Tom exhaled. “It’s going to hold. I think it’s going to hold.”

Jazz believed him. She wanted to believe him. But she couldn’t stop looking at the envelope on the shelf, the name *Priya Patel* printed in an unfamiliar hand, and wondering what kind of person disappears without a trace, leaving their questions behind for someone else to find.

*Someone who didn’t want to be found.*

She checked her phone. 2:47 PM. Three hours and thirteen minutes until the first real test of everything they’d built.

The kettle boiled behind her. Somewhere in the building, a door slammed.

Jazz stood and crossed to the window. Far below, through the grime of London’s late autumn, a woman in a red coat stood outside the letting agent’s office, staring up at the building.

Staring up at their window.

Jazz’s breath caught. The woman was too far away to make out a face, but she was standing very still, like someone who’d come looking for something.

Then a bus pulled past, and when it cleared, the street was empty.

Jazz turned back to Tom. His gaze was locked on the simulation as it ticked past 91%.

“I think we should find out who Priya Patel was,” she said quietly.

“Not today,” Tom said, without looking up.

No, not today. Today belonged to Davis and the bug and the impossible clock.

But the pile of mail stayed on the shelf, and Jazz couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d just inherited more than a startup’s worth of problems.

They’d inherited someone else’s ghost.