Anyway, she was pretty sure her coworkers were plotting against her. Office life made her paranoid—she was being watched, after all—but things had gotten worse lately. In the mornings, Eleanor, her boss, a beautiful, curt, fundamentally decent woman of sixty, brushed past her door without a word. Her hallmate, the last remaining communications associate still based in the United States, seemed to have her door closed at all hours of the day. Around the corner, Douglas, whose most valued trait was the presence of a faithfully forbearing Saint Bernard curled heavily in his office’s Ikea chair, gave her only monosyllables when she stopped by, his eyes fixed on his massive monitor. The only person who responded normally to her was Greta, the department assistant, who, Cassie feared, was herself at risk of losing her job for her laissez-faire attitude toward task fulfillment and flagrant violations of the office dress code. Though Cassie still didn’t consider this job her “real life,” she also preferred not to be fired from it. She knew that she would start crying immediately if it was so much as suggested that there had been a lapse in her work, even if it was, to be honest, mostly lapses at this point. She did not want them to see her cry. She thought that Eleanor might be able to maintain a vaguely empathetic expression on her face for the minutes it would take to dismiss her, though she knew that, inside, she would be disgusted.

In these caverns of anxiety, Cassie rarely spent much time speculating about what she would be fired for, exactly. It simply seemed inevitable. She took excessively long lunch breaks, sometimes pretending she was meeting with fake people about matters pertaining to the law school alumni magazine, the rewriting and fact-checking of whose articles was theoretically her day’s occupation. She wandered the halls of the law school, sometimes watching a few silent minutes of a lecture in progress before accidentally catching the eye of a student or professor. Mostly, of course, she responded to personal emails or browsed the Internet trying to find a more interesting job. But surely this was how most people spent their workdays?

The alternative to imminent dismissal—that her colleagues liked her fine, or at least as much as was necessary to not bother going through the arduous process of removing her—seemed fantastically optimistic. She was certain that something was being planned, something to which she was not privy. It seemed unlikely that, when they met behind closed doors without her, they were planning her a surprise birthday party. Her birthday had passed, unacknowledged, four months ago.

Greta, the assistant, appeared now in her doorway. She was a slightly implausible combination of certitude and naïveté, the exact admixture of which was only possible between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-four.