The Four Faces of Jan

Stan Simmons sat behind the walnut desk on the executive floor of Apex Brewing Headquarters and ran his finger along the last line of the speech one more time. The board would vote Friday. The title was already sitting in the documents like a piece of furniture someone had measured twice. Chief Executive Officer. He had earned every syllable of it, or at least that was the version he told himself while the streets below shrank into a silent, distant grid behind the sheer drop of the glass.

The speech was clean. Numbers in the right places. A paragraph about heritage and another about growth. He had practiced it in the car that morning until the words lost their edges. Outside the window, the downtown skyline held still in late afternoon light. He liked that stillness. It matched the version of himself he had spent fourteen years building.

His assistant’s voice came through the intercom, even and professional. “Mr. Simmons, the last applicant for taproom manager is here. Yvonne Drake.”

He glanced at the folder. The resume was already stacked, references checked, HR notes in neat type. Flagship taproom. High-volume hospitality. The kind of hire that made the board nod without asking extra questions.

“Send her in.”

The door opened. Stan stood because that was what executives did. Then his heart stopped in a way that had nothing to do with standing.

The woman who stepped across the carpet had chestnut waves that fell the same way they had fourteen years ago. The same delicate jawline. The same piercing green eyes that used to look at him like he was the only honest thing in a bad night. Jan Holloway—except Jan belonged under six feet of cold cemetery turf, sealed in the box he had watched get lowered into the ground while he stood three rows back and pretended he was just another mourner.

Yvonne Drake carried a slate briefcase in her left hand. She crossed the office as if she belonged in it. She set the case down, extended her right hand, and the handshake was firm, cool, corporate. Ice went up Stan’s arm and stayed there.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Simmons,” she said.

The voice was wrong and right at the same time. Polished. Formal. Underneath it, something in the cadence pulled at a memory he had spent years stuffing into a drawer that did not exist anymore.

He let go of her hand too quickly and sat. His chair creaked. He hoped she did not notice.

“Please,” he said. “Have a seat.”

She did. She crossed her ankles. She opened the briefcase and slid a printed packet across the desk with the same unhurried confidence Jan used to have when she thought the night was going to turn out well. Stan did not look at the packet. He looked at her face and tried to make it into a coincidence.

People had doubles. The world was full of them. Lighting did strange things. Grief did stranger ones. He had been at the funeral. He had seen the casket. He had seen the dirt.

“Your resume is impressive,” he said, and heard how thin his own voice sounded. “Hospitality operations. Two flagship openings. Inventory controls that actually hold under volume.”

“I like systems that don’t lie,” she said. A small smile. Not warm. Not cold. Just exact. “If a taproom can’t tell you where the waste went on a Tuesday, it can’t tell you anything.”

Jan used to talk like that when she was half joking and half serious, the same rhythm, the same little lift at the end of a sentence that made you wait for the next one. Stan’s mouth went dry. He reached for the water glass and missed it by an inch, then caught it, then drank too much.

Yvonne watched him drink. She did not look away.

“Tell me about the last place you managed,” he said.

She did. Names. Dates. Labor percentages. A story about a distributor who tried to short a delivery and how she had stood in the cooler with a clipboard until the count matched. Every credential was clean. Every reference in the HR file had already been verified. There was nothing to catch her on. That was the problem. There was nothing to catch her on except the face that should not have been sitting six feet from his desk.

He asked about scheduling software, but her reply drifted past him, swallowed by the low hum of the air vents and the sudden roar of blood in his ears. He saw her mouth move, watched the slight dip of her collarbone as she spoke, but the words slipped away like water through clenched fingers. He forced out another question about conflict with kitchen staff just to hear himself talk. She answered with steady, even syllables that blurred together into empty sound, until she used a phrase Jan had used once in a motel parking lot, something about not confusing charm with a plan, and Stan felt the floor tilt under the expensive carpet.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Could you repeat that?”

“I said I don’t confuse charm with a plan, Mr. Simmons. Charm gets you through the first shift. A plan gets you through the quarter.”

She smiled again. Unsettling poise. The kind of composure that made him feel like he was the one being interviewed.

His pulse hammered in his throat. He could hear it. He wondered if she could hear it too. Fourteen years of carefully stacked silence sat in his chest like a brick. One night. One argument with Rebecca. One impulsive hour that had turned into a pregnancy, a medical crisis, a death, and a funeral he had attended like a coward. He had buried it. He had built a life on top of it. CEO. Wife. Daughters. A speech on the desk that did not mention any of that.

And here she was. Breathing. Blinking. Wearing a slate blazer that made her look like she belonged in his world instead of the one he had left her in.

“Why Apex?” he asked, because he needed a normal question more than he needed air.

“Because you don’t hide the product,” she said. “The beer is what it is. I like rooms that tell the truth even when the lighting is expensive.”

Jan had said something close to that once, drunk and laughing, about people who polished everything until it stopped being real. Stan’s hands were shaking under the desk. He pressed his palms against his thighs until the shaking slowed enough to look like stillness.

He tried to study her as an executive would. Age. Mid-thirties. That tracked if Jan had lived. Same height. Same way of sitting too straight, like she expected the chair to be taken away. A tiny scar near the left eyebrow that he did not remember. Or maybe he did. Memory was a liar. That was what he told himself. Memory was a liar and grief made faces out of strangers.

Except she was not a stranger. Not in the way that mattered.

“Your references checked out,” he said. “All of them.”

“I would hope so.” She folded her hands in her lap. “I don’t apply to places that don’t do their homework.”

The office felt smaller. The glass wall behind her showed the city, but the city looked fake now, a backdrop. He could smell her perfume, something light and citrus that was not the cheap stuff Jan used to wear, and somehow that made it worse. The details were almost right and then not right, like a photograph that had been corrected by someone who knew exactly which mistakes would keep him from screaming.

He asked another question about licensing. She answered without looking at notes. He asked about a hypothetical inventory discrepancy. She walked him through it in a voice that never rose. Intense eye contact the whole time. Green. Too green. He wanted to look at the wall, the speech, the window, anything else, and he could not.

A tremor started in his left knee and climbed. Anxiety had a shape now. It sat in the chair across from him and smiled like it had all afternoon.

He thought of the funeral again. The rain. The cheap flowers. The way he had not gone to the hospital when it counted. Delilah. The complications. The silence afterward. He had told himself it was over because it had to be over. Dead people did not apply for jobs in slate blazers.

“I think we’ve covered the essentials,” he said. The words came out clipped, almost a bark. He softened them too late. “I, I’m sorry. I have to cut this short. I forgot I have a conference call coming up. I’ll be in touch.”

Yvonne did not look surprised. She did not look disappointed. She closed the briefcase, stood, and offered her hand again. He took it because not taking it would have been an admission. The same ice. The same calm pressure of fingers that knew exactly how long to hold.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Simmons,” she said. “I look forward to hearing from you.”

She turned. She walked to the door with the same unhurried steps she had used coming in. At the threshold she paused, just long enough for him to think she might look back, and then she did not. The door closed. The carpet swallowed her footsteps. The corridor took her.

Stan sat very still. Then the stillness broke.

He grabbed the edge of the desk with both hands. The walnut was solid. The speech papers slid. His breath came in short, ugly pulls. He told himself it was a look-alike. A trick of lighting. A woman who happened to share a bone structure and a pair of eyes. The world had millions of faces. Statistics. That was all.

His heart did not believe statistics. It hammered like it wanted out of his rib cage. Sweat ran down his spine under the tailored shirt. He stood, sat, stood again, then dropped into the chair and clutched the desk until his knuckles went white.

Jan is dead, he thought. Jan Holloway is dead. You were at the funeral. You saw the box go down.

He opened the HR file on the screen with fingers that barely worked. Yvonne Drake. Social. Address. Prior employers. Background check green. References who had answered the phone and said the right things. Immaculate. Not a gap. Not a misspelled date. The system had swallowed her whole and called her legitimate.

He stared at the small photo attached to the application. Same face. Same eyes. The photograph did not blink. The woman who had just left had blinked. She had spoken. She had used Jan’s rhythm like it was a family heirloom.

Stan’s vision tunneled. The office lights seemed too bright. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until colors burst, then looked again, as if the room might have reset while he was not watching.

It had not reset. The slate of the briefcase was gone. The chair across from him was empty. The faint citrus hung in the air anyway.

He picked up the intercom, almost called his assistant, almost asked if the woman who just left had looked strange to anyone else. He put the phone down. That was how people started rumors. That was how CEOs lost Friday votes. That was how a buried night crawled into the light and took everything with it.

He tried to breathe the way the executive coach had taught him years ago. Four counts in. Hold. Four out. The counts collapsed on the second try. His stomach turned. He thought he might be sick in the trash can beside the desk, the expensive one that matched the rest of the suite.

He whispered her name aloud into the empty room, the syllables scraping raw and foreign in his throat after fourteen years of silence.

“Jan.”

The room did not answer. The city outside did not answer. His own reflection in the darkening glass looked like a man who had just seen a ghost walk out of a job interview with perfect credentials and a handshake that still lived in his palm.

He pulled the speech toward him and the words on the page refused to mean anything. Heritage. Growth. Leadership. They looked like someone else’s language. He folded the top sheet once, then again, then flattened it with a shaking hand because creasing the speech felt like admitting the afternoon had already ruined him.

Down the corridor, an elevator chimed. He imagined her standing in it, slate case at her side, green eyes facing the doors, already gone and somehow still in the room. He imagined her turning those eyes on him from every angle of the building. He told himself that was insane.

The tremor in his hands would not stop. He locked his fingers together on the desk and still they moved. Anxiety was no longer an abstract word he used in passing about other men. It was in his teeth. It was in the sweat under his collar. It was in the certainty that the past had not stayed buried, that it had put on a blazer and asked for a salary and a title and a chance to stand in his office like it had every right.

He opened a drawer, shut it, opened it again. Nothing in there would help. There was no document that explained a dead woman’s face on a living applicant. There was no clause in the promotion packet for this.

Stan leaned forward until his forehead almost touched the wood. He stayed there, clutching the desk, trying to force the image of her into something ordinary. A stranger. A coincidence. A woman named Yvonne Drake who happened to have the same jaw, the same eyes, the same way of sitting too straight.

It would not hold. The rationalizations kept slipping. Each time he almost had one, her voice came back, the little lift at the end of a sentence, the line about charm and a plan, the thank-you that had sounded like a closing argument.

He sat up. His face felt hot. His mouth tasted like metal. He looked at the closed door and waited for it to open again, for her to come back and admit the joke, for someone to tell him he had been mistaken. The door stayed shut.

On the street far below, traffic moved in ordinary lines. People went about ordinary evenings. Stan Simmons, who was one vote away from running the company, sat in Executive Suite 400 and shook like a man who had just watched the grave sit up, straighten its jacket, and ask for a job.

He whispered it once more, as if saying it could nail the world back in place.

“She’s dead.”

The empty chair did not disagree. The verified file on the screen did not disagree. The ice in his veins did not fade. He held the desk and tried to stop trembling, and the more he tried, the more the afternoon settled into a single impossible fact he could not yet name without breaking.

The woman who had left his office had Jan Holloway’s face. She had walked out smiling. And Stan, who had built his life on never looking back, could not stop seeing her even with his eyes closed.