Chapter 1: Haunting Hours

Gerald Pomfrey had been dead for forty years, and he still hated Mondays.

He haunted the fourth floor of the Whitlock & Sons accounting firm, where he had died at his desk in 1983 under a stack of unreconciled invoices. As ghosts went, he was not especially frightening. He rattled the filing cabinets on schedule, flickered the lights during staff meetings, and occasionally breathed on someone's neck, mostly out of habit.

Nobody had ever noticed. Until Priya.

Priya Raman was twenty-two, wore bright yellow sneakers, and had been hired as the intern on a Monday, naturally. At 9:04 a.m. she looked up from her laptop, locked eyes with Gerald hovering behind the water cooler, and said, "Oh. Hi. Are you the building's ghost?"

Gerald dropped his spectral coffee mug. "You can see me?"

"Yeah. Is that weird?"

"It has never happened before."

"Cool." She took a sip of her latte. "Do you have, like, a LinkedIn?"

Over the following weeks, Priya became the only person in the office who treated Gerald like a colleague. She asked him questions about the old filing system. She asked him to help find a lost contract (it was behind the radiator). She even invited him to the Friday potluck, where he could not eat anything but stood nearby, glowing proudly.

"You know," she said one afternoon, "you are actually a really good accountant."

"I am dead," Gerald pointed out.

"Sure. But you spotted that error in the Henderson account in about four seconds."

Gerald floated a little higher. Nobody had praised his work since the Carter administration.

On the first Monday of December, the firm's director announced layoffs. The whole floor went pale. Priya stood up and, to everyone's amazement, delivered a flawless fifteen-minute presentation on cost savings, every figure supplied by a very pleased ghost whispering numbers in her ear.

The layoffs were cancelled. The director gave her a raise and a full-time position.

That evening, as the lights dimmed, Gerald drifted to her desk. "Thank you," he said stiffly. "I think I hate Mondays slightly less now."

Priya grinned. "Give it time. I will make you love Tuesdays too."

And for the first time in forty years, the fourth floor of Whitlock & Sons was completely quiet, with no rattling at all.