Carla was about eighty percent sure she was being haunted. It wasn't the only explanation, but it was the only one that made sense anymore.

The first time Carla saw her, she had dismissed it as a trick of the light; there in one moment and gone the next, like a speck of dust passing through a sunbeam. The girl was on her mind ever since she had had to fire her—she wasn't sure she'd ever forget the look on the poor thing's face: scoured with worry lines, eyes bloodshot, tears forming but held back from falling—it was only natural she might start seeing her where she wasn't.

The second time, she spoke.

Well, not exactly. Sarah walked up wearing her face, and said something about the CFO. But those two had always looked similar; it wasn't the first time Carla had gotten them confused. The only strange thing was, when Carla realized her mistake and asked her to repeat herself, Sarah hadn't mentioned the CFO at all.

In fact, nobody remembered anything about the CFO. Carla herself could only remember the beginnings of a name. A pair of initials.

But the ghost of Thalia Hart remembered, and it was all she talked about. Carla tried to hold on to what she said—tried to gather up the pieces to an invisible puzzle, only to find that none of them fit together. Carla tried transcribing the apparition's words, only to find indecipherable jumbles of letters once it had vanished. She tried recording the conversations, and listened back to herself speaking in riddles to confused employees, or worse, the empty air.

What confused Carla the most was that Thalia wasn't dead. After a week of apparent hallucinations, she had emailed the girl her final tax documents, and received a hasty yet in-character response that simply read: "Thanks. When will my last paycheck be? -Thalia." She double-checked the local obituaries every day too, in the Times and online, just to be sure. Nothing. The paycheck went through without a hitch.

So, what, then? She was being haunted by guilt? Over firing that freeloader? That made even less sense. She'd had fewer sleepless nights after cutting much more valuable employees loose. She had gradually built up the courage to mention it to her doctor, but he only gave her a list of SSRIs and antipsychotics, and a recommendation to a psychiatrist with a year-long waitlist. "Stress-related visions, most likely," he had said. "Try to take some time off for the holidays, too." Uh huh. Sure.

Her next strategy was to ignore the visions altogether. This backfired immediately: Thalia's ghost howled at her like she was dying. She begged Carla to look at her, to listen—to help, somehow. When she inevitably snapped and acknowledged the specter, it would spout off the same unknowable gibberish as always. It was more annoying than anything else.

Eventually, Carla learned to just hear the poor girl out. If she let Thalia say her piece, she would vanish again—or at least settle into the background, popping silently between the visages of her former coworkers and locking eyes with Carla until one of them blinked.

Then, without warning, she vanished for good.

She almost didn't notice, at first. Two days passed—she wasn't in the break room, clocking in; she wasn't on Sarah's face, or anyone else's; she wasn't creeping in the shadows behind the big standees, or in the stairwell to the projection floor. Carla walked on the balls of her feet, waiting for the puny little slacker to spring out of anywhere.

Another few days passed. She managed to take a single day off, and mostly slept through it. It had yet to snow this winter, but the sleet was drearier than she'd seen in years. Her car skidded and shuddered through the icy December streets the next day, the rain blurring the Christmas lights in her neighborhood into streaks of color pasted on her windows.

After crawling her way to work through the churning winter traffic, Carla parked in her spot behind the theater, performed her best approximation of a breathing exercise, and dashed through the freezing rain into the building. She strolled through the lobby, flicking switches one by one, hoping that each shuddering beam of light would reveal Thalia—the real Thalia, hiding somewhere in the dark this whole time to skimp out on work—but the place was barren as ever.

Barren, that is, until she opened the door to the office and found the CFO sitting behind her desk, or at least someone who looked like the CFO. All at once the memory reappeared; it pulled into focus like Carla was putting on glasses. This woman had the same face as the executive she had met over a month ago, but was dressed in an entirely different wardrobe. A crisp-edged, masculine dress shirt and slacks. A tie. It clashed with the softness in her face, with her rounded and slightly crooked nose, with her delicate mouth. Carla still couldn't remember her name, though. She was stunned into silence, but that was okay, because the CFO seemed to have a lot to say.

"Oh, good, you're here today. I showed up yesterday and scared the piss out of the other manager. Hey—what day is it, anyway? Ah, don't answer that, it'll just annoy me." She was talking more to herself than to Carla. "I just wanted to apologize about the afterimage you've been seeing. That must've been… hah! That must've been quite the little scare, I'm sure." She laughed and said "little scare" again, quieter.

"Point is," she continued, "she shouldn't bother you again. Real sloppy on my part—sorry again, I'm so out of practice dealing with time residue bullshit—"

"S-sorry," Carla managed to squeak, "afterimage—you mean Thalia's ghost?"

"Ghost! Ha! Wouldn't that make things easier… No, not exactly, but sure. The manifestations you've been seeing. You did fire her, didn't you?" Carla nodded. "Yeah, I really should've kept her home after that first time. Well, lessons learned, huh?"

"I don't understand," said Carla, "what is—"

"Oh, you won't need to worry about it. I really did just come here to apologize. Well," said the CFO, plucking something out of her pocket, "to apologize, and to help you out." She stretched out her palm, and dangled a small, circular pendant on a golden chain. Carla watched the pendant swing—felt her eyes matching its rhythm on their own accord—noticed her consciousness dribbling away from her—and the last thing she heard, before she awoke the next morning, from the best sleep she had ever had in her life and with no memory of the day before, was the CFO's voice, saying: "This will only take a moment."