The parking lot had the particular, early-morning quality of a place that was just beginning to fill — cars pulling in at intervals, people moving through with the purposeful pace of a workday starting, the low-level hum of a building waking up. Aurora sat in her car and looked at the entrance to Ashford Technologies and felt, without entirely meaning to, the pull of familiarity.
She had parked in this lot more times than she could count over the past few months. Had walked through those doors with documents under her arm and an agenda in her head, had learned which elevator was fastest, had memorized the particular rhythm of the building's mornings. And then she had stopped coming, and the rhythm had continued without her, the way things did when you removed yourself from them.
