‘I’m sorry!’ She shouted behind her. ‘Can you just—? Look, I’ll pick it up later …’

And she kept walking until the whole place was out of sight and she was out of breath, her eyes stinging with tears she hadn’t realized she’d cried. The frog stared at her as she got out her phone to call a taxi, and, once again, the notification popped up on her screen:

Morpheus. Dream your way to a better you – one sleep at a time.

Thea blamed the frog and the broken carcass of her car as the reasons why she found herself that evening in the local pub, squashed between her desk-mate, Lisa, and a man from a different department with a thin face and thinner hair.

The office where she spent her days moving numbers from one spreadsheet to another was a grey, open-plan box. It always smelled of microwave-ready meals from the encrusted kitchen in the corner, had carpet the consistency of Velcro and an air-conditioning system that had a poor grasp of the seasons. She didn’t even have a desk of her own but shared one with Lisa, a middle-aged woman who filled her workspace with so many photographs, paperweights and cute figures that they often made attempts to colonize Thea’s territory. She spent probably too much of her day pushing back googly-eyed unicorns with a pencil. One cuddly car-frog was more than enough for her.

But, this time, when Lisa had asked her to the pub for after-work drinks, Thea had said yes.

She deserved a night out. She deserved the kind of night other people had regularly. One without worrying about how late it could get and that she wouldn’t have time for her wind-down routine and it was Thursday and she had work the next morning and she couldn’t get up late but she wouldn’t get any sleep at all and that car crash would be nothing compared to the mistakes she could make if she was utterly, utterly sleepless—

‘See? Aren’t you glad you came out? You should do it more often.’ Lisa’s nails had tiny daisies painted on them.

It was Margaret’s leaving drinks. Thea hadn’t really known that Margaret had ever arrived in the first place.

‘Too good for the likes of us, eh?’ The thin man smiled.