The email arrived at 9.12 in the morning and by 9.14 it had already stopped mattering to most people.
Arjun Malhotra read it twice because something about it refused to settle. It was short. Careful. Polite. The kind of message written to end conversations before they started. Shailesh Rao would no longer be with the company due to health reasons. The team was requested to respect privacy. Workstreams would be reassigned.
No farewell line. No contact number. No meeting invite to explain the transition.
By 9.20 the office had absorbed it and moved on.
Someone near the coffee machine said heart attack. Another said stress. A third said these things happen once you cross forty. Nobody lowered their voice. Nobody sounded afraid. It was not that kind of news. It did not feel like danger. It felt like maintenance.
Arjun kept his screen unchanged for a while after that. Shailesh had sat two rows ahead. Same floor. Same lift. Same lunch timings most days. Not close. Not distant either. Just present in the way people are when they have occupied the same routine long enough.
Three days earlier Shailesh had forwarded a meeting request for the following week. No sign off that hinted at collapse. No sudden urgency. No goodbye disguised as professionalism.
Arjun opened the performance dashboard again. He had no reason to. He told himself that. The numbers were unchanged. Revenue targets. Client satisfaction. Attrition rates. All familiar. Then he noticed the weighting.
Customer escalation response time had been adjusted. Quietly. Slightly. It was still a minor metric on paper. But its influence had increased enough to matter. Shailesh had always struggled with that one. Not disastrously. Just enough to keep it flagged.
The change had been made two weeks ago.
Arjun checked the change log. Approved. Properly documented. No names stood out. No rules were broken. It was the sort of internal adjustment that happened all the time and usually meant nothing.
Except now it did.
By lunch the conversation about Shailesh had ended completely. A new deadline had arrived. A client had raised an issue. Someone had booked the wrong conference room. The system absorbed the absence and rebalanced itself with disturbing ease.
Arjun watched Shailesh desk being cleared in the evening. Not ceremonially. Just a facilities worker placing files into a carton. No one stopped. No one asked what would happen to the projects he had overseen. Those had already been redistributed.
On the way out Arjun saw Shailesh wife near the reception. She looked composed in the way people do when they are still functioning on instructions. HR spoke softly. A document was signed. A hand was shaken.
It occurred to Arjun then that if he had not noticed the metric change he would have accepted the explanation without friction. He would have said stress like everyone else. He would have meant it.
At home that night he opened his laptop again. Not to investigate. That word felt dramatic and dishonest. He just wanted to understand whether this kind of coincidence happened often.
He searched old change logs. Old exits. Old restructurings that had been explained with medical language and polite emails. He did not look for proof. He did not even know what proof would look like.
He was only looking for repetition.
By midnight he had found three more cases. Different departments. Different years. Different reasons. All ordinary. All legal. All unremarkable.
Except for the timing.
Arjun closed the laptop and sat in the dark for a while. He did not feel fear. He felt something quieter and more corrosive.
Recognition.
If this was deliberate then it was not criminal. If it was accidental then it was too clean to ignore.
Nothing illegal had happened.
And that was the problem.