The floor was quiet by eight.
Aurora had barely noticed the departure—the gradual thinning of voices in the corridor, the lights going off in the adjacent offices one by one, the building settling into the particular silence of a place that had stopped being used for the day. She had been in the middle of the Nexus Media revenue projections and then, suddenly, she wasn't anymore, because she had looked up and the clock on her laptop read 8:04 and the city outside her floor-to-ceiling window was dark.
She sat back. Pressed her fingers against her temple.
The grocery store. She needed to stop there on the way home—she had been putting it
off for three days and her refrigerator had reached the specific stage of emptiness where avoidance was no longer a viable strategy.
She closed the laptop, packed her bag, turned off the desk lamp, and took the elevator down.
