Do Not Delete

Forty people, a house on the north shore of Long Island, one bar of phone signal, and a pool lit from underneath.

On the Saturday morning of the offsite, the founder of Kesselring Loew walks Teo Vasquez-Lindt down to the boathouse and tells him, kindly and at length, that the firm is going to somebody else. On the Sunday morning he is dead at the bottom of the lawn.

Teo never touched him. At two in the morning he carried an ugly thirty-one dollar cooler eleven feet up the terrace, because it was in the wrong place. He will repeat that sentence to himself every day for the next two and a half years.

By January he is running the firm, the youngest chief executive in its history, and extraordinary at the job, because nothing in a meeting can frighten a man who has already done the worst thing he will ever do. And nobody has closed the dead man’s email account. The calendar keeps firing. Every payment still routes to an approver who died two years ago. Then the texts begin, at four in the morning, from a number in the wrong county, and they know where the cooler was.

Do Not Delete is a novel about appetite and succession, about a firm where nothing is ever deleted and nobody is ever quite responsible, and about the man at the next desk whom Teo will never be able to say out loud that he loved.

The haunting is not a ghost. It is a retention policy.