At the break I went and stood in the ladies’ room on the nineteenth floor, which I had cleaned two hundred and forty times, and put my hands on the counter.

I had spent two years hating this man in the abstract.

I’d built him in my mind as somebody enormous — as a co-architect, a partner in the ruin, a man who had looked at the shape of my life and decided to take it apart.

And what he actually was, was a man who couldn’t come up with my surname without help, who had ended my income the way you’d move a chair out of a walkway.

That was the thing nobody warns you about. It would have been easier to be hated. Being hated at least means somebody looked.

Kit came in and washed her hands and said nothing for a minute.