Hidden by Catherine McKenzie Page A

was a small but persistent group — almost always men, almost always of a certain age—who started compiling lists.
    Top Ten Most Likely to Have Their Corpse Eaten by Their Cats. Top Ten Trying Too Hard. Top Ten MILFs. And so on. If you can think of it, the list existed. While some of them were funny, those of us “lucky” enough to be management had the distinctly unfun task of trying to discover the perpetrators so they could be disciplined.
    And that’s how I re-met Tish.
    When a particularly nasty list went around—Top Ten Facial Blemishes That Ought to Be Taken Care of Immediately—I actually felt motivated to find the culprit. My own assistant was on it, and the mole on her chin wasn’t that bad, really. I had a pretty good idea who the perpetrator was, a junior accountant named Evan. Since he was someone I’d been wishing I had something on for a while—he was a dick of the highest order, and marginally competent to boot—I did some skulking around and got the proof I needed.
    My boss, Gerry, was all for firing him, so he took it upstairs and came back with the okay to give him the axe. An “example had to be set,” and guess who got to set it?
    Yessir.
    Gerry suggested I get some HR training before I did the deed, something about protecting us from liability if Evan went postal.
    “I’ve found Tish from the other Springfield helpful. Plus, she’s number 5 on—”
    I held up my hand. “Don’t say it. Then I’ll have to report you too.”
    “Good luck with that.”
    He did one of those high school bird-flipping manoeuvres that turned into rubbing the side of his nose before snickering his way out of my office.
    I’m pretty sure Gerry’s the origin of more than one list.
    I almost called after him to ask “Tish who?” but it occurred to me that Tish was a pretty unusual name. There probably weren’t two people named Tish in the HR department in the other Springfield.
    So it proved. A couple clicks of the keyboard brought me to the contact page of Tish Underhill—real name Patricia—and I couldn’t keep my face from breaking into a grin.
    I’d thought of her occasionally since that chance meeting in the food line. Fleeting thoughts, mostly when HR got mentioned, but I’d never made any effort to find her. Because what was the point? She’d made it fairly clear that she didn’t want to be found …
    But when I pulled up her contact information, I admit I spent a long time studying it, her picture in particular. Not because she looked great in it—okay, not
only
because she looked great in it—but because of the whole attitude of the thing. Her dark hair tumbled over her shoulders, like she’d just released it from an elastic, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. She held her chin in her hand, a pose I usually would’ve found derisible, but in her case, it gave off the perfect mix of ease and I-don’t-give-a-fuck. This is me, her picture said, love it or hate it.
    I loved it, and found myself looking at it whenever I had an idle moment.
    I may have had a lot of idle moments.
    I also loved what she wrote in her profile. No embellishmentsor waxing eloquent about her pets. She was married, she had a daughter, she loved reading and golf.
    It was, in fact, nearly word for word what I wrote in my own biography, which I’d left till the last minute and dashed off without any thought. Maybe that’s what she’d done too. Whatever it was — our strange first conversation, the similarity of our thought process—I felt a sense of kinship with her.
    If I’m being honest, it took me a few days to work up the courage to contact her. But like all things, it had to be done some time. There was a firing to do, after all, and so I opened her contact page, glanced at her now familiar picture, discarded the mental drafts I’d composed, and wrote:
    Patricia
,
    Not sure if you remember me, but we met a while back at that company retreat in Mexico. I was the guy who completely embarrassed himself in the