The first note wasn't meant to be personal. Marcus had written it on the back of a requisition form: "Spill in server room 3. Already put down absorb-all but floor's still slick." He'd left it taped to the supply closet door where the cleaning staff would see it.
The next night, he found a response in the same spot, written in careful cursive: "Thank you. I mopped with the degreaser. Should be fine now. - E"
That was how it started.
Marcus worked four ten-hour shifts, Wednesday through Saturday, 9 PM to 7 AM. He'd been doing it for three years now, ever since his back gave out and he couldn't do electrical work anymore. The data center sat twelve miles outside Broken Bow, a concrete block in the middle of cornfields, humming with the constant white noise of cooling systems and servers. Prairie Tech Solutions, they called it. Some company out of California owned it, storing information for banks and insurance companies.
He made his rounds every two hours, checking doors, scanning his badge at checkpoints, making sure the temperature readings stayed normal. Between rounds, he sat in the security office watching monitors that showed empty hallways and parking lots. Sometimes a deer would wander into frame. Once, a tornado touched down three miles away, but the building just hummed on, unaffected.
The cleaning woman – E – worked the same nights but in reverse pattern. When he was in the north wing, she was in the south. When he checked the server rooms, she was doing the offices. They moved through the building like planets in separate orbits.
After a week of purely functional notes – "Paper towels out in east restroom," "Back door sensor acting up again" – Marcus found himself adding unnecessary details. "Coffee maker in break room making that burning smell again. Unplugged it. There's instant in my desk drawer if you need caffeine. - M"
Her response: "Thank you. I brought you some good instant from home. The Colombian kind. It's in the same drawer. - Elena"
Elena. He rolled the name around in his mind during his 3 AM round.
Derek, the day-shift guard who overlapped with Marcus for an hour each morning, noticed the notes one Thursday.
"You writing love letters?" Derek asked, picking up a folded paper from Marcus's desk.
Marcus snatched it back. "Work stuff."
"Right." Derek grinned. He was thirty-something, always talking about cryptocurrency and government surveillance. "You know she's married, right? The cleaning lady? Saw her husband drop her off once."
Marcus hadn't known that. He told himself it didn't matter. They were just notes.
But that night he found himself writing: "The Colombian coffee is good. Better than what my ex-wife used to buy. She liked that flavored stuff. Hazelnut. Always thought coffee should taste like coffee. - M"
Elena's response came the next night: "My husband likes the flavored kind too. French vanilla. I don't tell him I think it tastes like candy. Some battles aren't worth fighting. - E"
So she was married. Marcus felt something shift in his chest, a small repositioning of expectation he hadn't realized he'd been carrying.
The notes grew longer. Marcus started bringing better paper from home, not the recycled printer paper from the supply room. Elena's handwriting, always beautiful, seemed to grow more relaxed, the letters looser, more confident.
She told him about Guatemala, about her daughter Ana who wanted to be a doctor, about learning English from soap operas and library books. He told her about his sons in Omaha who called once a month, about the trailer he lived in that leaked when it rained, about the novel he'd been reading for six months, carrying it to work but rarely opening it.
"What's the book?" she wrote.
"The Great Gatsby. Never read it in school. Figured I should. But it's hard to focus here. The humming makes me sleepy. - M"
"I read it last year. The green light at the end of the dock. Everyone reaching for something they can't have. Very American. Very sad. - E"
Marcus wanted to ask what she was reaching for but didn't know how to phrase it in a note.
October turned to November. The corn around the data center was harvested, leaving stubbled fields that looked silver under the security lights. Marcus started arriving early, hoping to catch a glimpse of Elena, but their schedules were too precise, too separated. Once, he thought he saw her car pulling out as he pulled in, but it was dark and he couldn't be sure.
The notes became the highlight of his nights. He'd find them in different places – tucked under his coffee mug, taped to his monitor, slipped into his time card slot. He kept them all in a drawer, ordered by date.
"My daughter got into UNL," Elena wrote one night. "Pre-med. I don't know how we'll pay for it, but we'll figure it out. We always do."
"That's wonderful," Marcus wrote back. "My boys both went to trade school. Plumbing. Good money in plumbing. They're doing better than their old man."
"You're doing fine. You show up. You do your job. That's more than most people. - E"
Marcus read that note four times before his next round.
In December, Derek mentioned seeing corporate people in the building during day shift. "Suits from California. Walking around with clipboards, taking pictures. You know what that means."
Marcus knew. He'd been through it before at other jobs. The walks with clipboards always came before the layoffs.
The official announcement came through email on a Tuesday morning as Marcus was getting ready for bed. Prairie Tech Solutions was consolidating operations. The Broken Bow facility would transition to automated security systems and contracted cleaning services by February 1st. Current employees would receive two weeks' severance plus accumulated vacation time.
That night, Marcus's note was brief: "You see the email?"
"Yes. My husband says it's for the best. Says I work too much anyway. - E"
"What do you think?"
There was no response the next night. Or the night after. Marcus wondered if Elena had already found another job, already moved on. The thought made his chest feel hollow.
Finally, on Saturday, he found a longer note:
"I think I'll miss this. These notes. It's strange, isn't it? We've never actually met but I feel like I know you. I know you take your coffee black. I know you eat the same turkey sandwich every night at 1 AM. I know you call your son in Omaha every Sunday even though he usually doesn't answer. I know you're kind. That's not nothing. - E"
Marcus sat in the security office for twenty minutes, trying to compose a response. Everything he wrote seemed either too much or not enough. Finally:
"Would you like to meet? Just once, before this place shuts down? Coffee at the truck stop on Highway 2? - M"
He left the note in their usual spot and did his rounds. When he came back, there was no response. Not that night, or the next, or the next.
January arrived with an ice storm that coated everything in a glass shell. The data center's generators kicked in when the power lines went down, and Marcus spent his shift monitoring backup systems, making sure the servers stayed cool despite the heating system struggling.
He'd stopped leaving notes. Elena still left them occasionally – updates about the weather, her daughter's first semester, small observations about the world. But she never responded to his invitation.
Derek, who'd already found another job at a warehouse in Grand Island, said, "You should just walk over to her section. Say hello. What's the worst that could happen?"
But Marcus understood. The notes were one thing. They existed in a space outside of real life, outside of marriages and bills and disappointments. Meeting would change that, would make it all real in a way that might ruin what it had been.
On his last night, January 31st, Marcus did his rounds one final time. The building felt different knowing he wouldn't be back. The hum of the servers sounded mournful instead of comforting. He turned in his badge and keys to Derek, who was staying on for two more weeks to train the automated system technicians.
"There's something for you," Derek said, handing him an envelope.
Marcus's name was written on it in Elena's careful cursive. Inside was a note and a photograph. The photograph showed a woman, early forties maybe, standing in what looked like the data center's break room. She was smiling slightly, wearing the blue uniform shirt of the cleaning service. She was pretty in an ordinary way, the kind of face you'd pass in a grocery store without noticing, except for her eyes, which were bright and knowing.
The note read:
"Marcus - I'm sorry I couldn't meet you for coffee. It wouldn't have been fair to either of us. But I wanted you to know that these months of notes have meant something to me. In another life, maybe. Take care of yourself. Finish that novel. The ending is worth it. - Elena
P.S. - I'm not actually married. Haven't been for five years. But it's easier to let people think I am. Fewer questions that way. I thought you should know the truth."
Marcus sat in his truck in the empty parking lot, looking at the photograph and the note as the sun came up over the frozen cornfields. He thought about driving to the truck stop, waiting to see if she might show up after all. But he knew she wouldn't. Their relationship existed in notes left in empty hallways, in words written during the quiet hours when the rest of the world slept. That's where it belonged.
He drove home to his trailer, put Elena's photograph and note in the drawer with all the others. Then he picked up The Great Gatsby and opened it to where he'd left off months ago. He read until he fell asleep, and when he woke in the afternoon, he finished it.
She was right. The ending was worth it, even if it was sad. Even if everyone was reaching for something they couldn't have.
That night, out of habit, he woke at 8:30 PM and got dressed before remembering he had nowhere to go. He made coffee with the Colombian instant Elena had left him, sat at his kitchen table, and started writing a letter he'd never send:
"Dear Elena,
I understand why you didn't come. I think I even appreciate it. What we had was perfect in its own way, wasn't it? Two people moving through the same space, never touching, but somehow connected anyway..."
He wrote until morning, filling pages with things he'd wanted to say but never could in those brief notes. About loneliness and age and the way certain moments of connection can sustain you through long stretches of nothing. About the comfort of routine and the terror of change. About reaching for things, even when you know you can't have them, because the reaching itself means you're still alive, still hoping.
When he finished, he put the letter in the drawer with all of Elena's notes. Then he opened the newspaper and started looking at the help wanted ads. There was a night watchman position at a hospital in Kearney. Another at a distribution center in North Platte.
He circled them both, made more coffee, and sat at his table as the morning sun painted rectangles on his kitchen floor. Somewhere, Elena was probably getting home from a new job, or maybe she was looking at ads too. He hoped she'd found something good, something that paid better, had benefits. He hoped her daughter would become a doctor.
He never saw her again, never learned her last name, never heard her voice. But sometimes, when he was working his new job – he took the hospital position, it paid two dollars more an hour – he'd find himself leaving notes for the day shift. "Light out in stairwell B." "Someone left their lunch in the break room fridge." Simple things, functional things, but written carefully, with attention, as if they might mean something more to someone, somewhere, reaching through the dark.