Brendan sighs. I hear the click of his bedside lamp coming on. Which is yet more bad news for the phone sex. We don’t have sex with the light on.

We don’t have sex.

The thought is a furtive whisper in my head. That’s not true. We do have sex. Just, maybe, not a lot. Not that often.

I can’t remember the last time we made love.

I don’t know what I was thinking with the phone sex idea.

I must be high. High as a castle turret. “You are drunk, aren’t you?” Brendan says.

“Maybe a little.” If I told him I was high, he wouldn’t believe me.

“Well, some of us have to be up in six hours,” he says.

Anxiety flares like a match. I sit up straighter. “Why are you getting up so early?”

“I’ve been summoned to a meeting. I rang to tell you about it earlier,” he says. His tone is pointed.

I should have phoned him back sooner. I shouldn’t have rejected his call in the first place. Not with the Canadians rushing around the office like ants at a picnic table. Brendan said there was nothing to worry about, when he first got wind of the takeover.

“I’m sorry, Brendan. The coverage can be unreliable here.” But that’s not true. The truth is that it is me who can be unreliable here. And just like that, I am no longer high. I am no longer under the influence of an illegal substance. I should be glad I suppose. I should be relieved. I grip the phone tighter.

Brendan is in the middle of a sentence. “...at eight o’clock. And how can you take someone seriously with a name like Kurt Glass? It’s like a bloody stage name or something.”

I’m pretty sure Kurt Glass is Brendan’s new Canadian boss. But I’m not positive. Which means that I’ve only been half listening to him since the Canadians invaded, as he puts it. Maybe since before that. I bring all my attention to bear on what Brendan is saying now, as if I can make up for all of my previous scant attention.

“What’s the meeting about?” I ask when he stops talking.

“He didn’t say.”

I hear him doing the thing he does with his hair when he wakes up, which is to muss the front of it with the heel of his hand. I hear him stifling a yawn. “You should get some sleep,” I say.

He sighs then. It’s a weary sigh.

“When are you coming home?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say.

Silence then. In my bedroom, I hear the tick of Brendan’s alarm clock, set for six instead of eight.

“I don’t suppose you know where the tie Anna got me last Christmas is? The blue-and-silver one? It’s just I—”

“It’s in the cloakroom downstairs. Third hook on the left.”

“What’s it doing there?”

“I’m not sure. I noticed it the other day and I meant to put it back on your tie rack and then I forgot.”