Sacha dashed back to the office, torn between running flat-out to avoid getting back to work late and taking it easy to avoid arriving in a sweat. When she arrived back at the building she was panting heavily, even though in the end she hadn't been exerting herself all that much, and she thought with dismay about how unfit she was.

When she'd been living with her family and her sister asked her why she didn't socialise more, it was situations like this she always pointed to: it'd been nice to see Rona of course, but it'd also interrupted a carefully scheduled lunch break. She did the same thing just about every day, so she knew the timing: ten minutes to walk either way between the office and the café (being generous, not hurrying herself), ten to fifteen minutes to place her order and for her food to arrive, twenty-five to thirty minutes to eat it. Easy. But it all got messed up when you had someone else there on the opposite side of the table, wanting to talk all afternoon long. And Rona could talk. She'd got that habit back, all right, Sacha observed. So that was nice, at least. Sacha wondered what would have happened if she'd met Rona during her 'quiet phase' - as she referred to it privately, euphemistically, the word 'depression' being both too dreadful and too overwhelming. Would Rona have coaxed the friendship out of Sacha, so gently, so carefully, so insistently? Sacha doubted it. Rona probably wouldn't have even approached her. Wouldn't even have been out in the café that day, meeting up with Alain and Mal. Life, Sacha thought. Too many possibilities. So many that sometimes they scared her.

The light illuminating the numbers above the lift door shifted steadily left to right, and soon stopped behind the number eleven; an electronic bell-tone sounded, and the doors opened, and Sacha stepped out into the corridor that had become so familiar to her despite being so indistinguishable from every other corridor in every other office tower she'd ever been in. She turned left, walked, one, two, three, four, five paces. Hand on the door, and push. She could do it all with her eyes shut. Sometimes she did shut her eyes, at her desk, just for a moment, and she could hear the dull hum of the fluorescent lights overhead. Sometimes the sun slid in through the window on the far side of the office from Sacha, and lit everything in the office a brilliant gold, if the clouds were right and the sun was at the right angle, and for twenty minutes or so it was like being inside an ad. We've got something everyone needs, but don't worry, there's nothing to worry about now you've got it.

Sacha stepped through the door and there, sure enough, were her two regular greeters: Edward and Gene, who worked in booths on either side of the office's entrance like gargoyles outside a cathedral. Edward checked his watch pointedly. "Running a bit late aren't you, Sacha? Bit off a bit more than you could chew, eh?" He laughed to himself. "Better get back into it, don't want the bosses to find out about this." Sacha didn't reply, but scurried back to her desk with a harried feeling in her brain.

When she was out of earshot Gene turned to Edward, and joined in the laughter, though more wryly than his colleague. "Do you think she'll ever realise we're only kidding?" he asked.