“Call me David?” That he put this as a question went far with Teresa. It was a kind of invitation. He was a thin man, a little younger than she was, maybe twenty-five, with Hershey-bar hair that he parted on the side and combed back over the top of his squared-off head, though a few wayward sprigs always hung over his brow. He never passed through the large room where Teresa worked among seventeen other women without making eye contact with her and mouthing hello. The day he asked her to call him David, he’d stopped on the other side of her Underwood and rested one hand on the machine’s gray body; his other hand held a doodle-covered manila folder. “You do a bang-up job,” he said. The woman to the left of Teresa sniffed, or snorted, her fingers pecking at evergreen keys.

“I’m serious,” Mr. Hardy said. “Some of the girls here use correction fluid like spackle, but you don’t.” He bent forward so that his head was alongside hers and said straight over her shoulder, “I’ve asked Mr. Rand if we could get you moved over to Claims so you could be my secretary. He told me fat chance.”

Teresa, dressed in a plain white blouse and an olive skirt, was wishing she’d worn something prettier that day. She was wishing she owned nicer clothes. “The pool’s the pool,” she said.

“That’s what he said. ‘The pool’s the pool, it serves the whole company.’ ” David Hardy straightened back up. “He knows a good thing when he sees it.”

He smiled at her. Then he was gone, long-striding the path between the desks and cutting a comic, military turn at the wall beneath the large round clock.

“Missy,” the woman to her left said without looking at her. “Send me a postcard.”

Teresa hadn’t been flirted with since she’d met Dermot in the diner. She looked down at the memo wrapped around the platen, and sent her fingers flying.