Six years of a specific and unrepeatable job that somebody else did alone: nineteen and twenty-three days in a special care nursery, two years and two months of night audit, one pair of hands at three in the morning instead of two.

Evelyn’s thirties.

The whole of them, effectively, and she will not let me say that this was taken from her, because she says it was also where she found out what she was, and both of those are true and I am only permitted to write the second one down if I write the first.

Eighteen months of Medicaid and a seven-week application, which is the part she will not describe and which I have not asked about twice.

Bernadette Achterberg’s last two working years, and a woman of sixty-three being sick in a bathroom down the hall from an office she had worked in for fourteen years.