The big day had finally arrived. That was how both Rona and Si had phrased it to Sacha when she arrived in the magazine's office on Monday morning: the Big Day. The debut of her column, which she'd been working on for the best part of the last two weeks, and which she's still not quite finished. Oh, she'd written all the words all right, but she hadn't proof-read it and she hadn't done a spelling check or made sure that all the U.R.L.s for the various blogs she'd evaluated were correct, and she knew from past experience at university that these little things were always the ones that took the most time. She thought about that: it really did feel like being back at uni, rushing to finish an essay before midday. The Big Day: it was the due date. Lateness would be penalised.

Of course, she knew that Rona and Si were each trying - quite independently - to get her excited about the column, as excited as they were (although for her part, Rona was more excited about having Sacha around than about the column itself), but their reminders to her of the day's significance couldn't help but make her a little nervous. This, she supposed upon reflection, was also the point: to gently press upon her the urgency of the looming deadline.

Meanwhile, in Brunswick, Hannah was facing a deadline of her own, one which she'd also allowed herself to be locked in to and which she was partly looking forward to but mostly dreading: she was due to go across the river and visit her family again. She was trying to put it off as she long as possible.

It wasn't that her family was overwhelming - there were only two of them, her younger brother and her mother - but she knew precisely what to expect from them, especially from her mother: when Hannah was a child her mother had run quite a strict household, with very definite opinions on how life was to be led - most of which were precisely the opposite of the way Hannah was living now. If her mother had hated her for turning her back on her upbringing, that would be one thing, Hannah thought grimly as she finished the glass of wine she'd been drinking with her lunch. But her mother didn't hate her: for all their disagreements, her mother still cared about her. Cared about her with the kind of love that tries to save souls. And her brother . . . Her brother's love, when he had been ten, eleven, twelve, had always been unconditional. Now she wasn't so sure. She wondered what it must be like to visit one's family without feeling like you were wearing a suit of armour.

By three o'clock in the afternoon Sacha's deadline was almost upon her. Rona had been hovering more and more insistently over her shoulder, which did nothing to aid Sacha's concentration, and which Sacha had no doubt would only infuriate with its subtlety the magazine's other contributors, who Sacha had witnessed Rona cajoling, berating, pushing for results so that the magazine might somehow lurch out onto the streets for another week. She felt like Rona was handling her with kid-gloves. She felt like she was getting special treatment, and she bristled against it.

But she managed to get the column finished. She saved it in the folder on the magazine's network, just as Rona had shown her on her very first day. She was quite pleased with it, though she could see plenty of scope for improvement - and she was sure she'd work out how to improve it in a few weeks time.

At five o'clock, in Brunswick, Hannah's deadline had arrived. The sky was dimming overhead and a few early-evening stars were starting to appear, like spots of ice in the cooling air. Hannah pulled her coat tight around her and strode stiffly out of her house to the tram-stop.