“I’ll bring these up,” Leah shouted from the kitchen from where I could hear the kettle starting to hum.

I followed Marina up the narrow stairs and into my office at the top, with slight trepidation, but even I couldn’t have imagined what awaited me. I stopped in the doorway in shock.

I was the type of solicitor who filed things away so I didn’t lose them, who prioritized her work carefully, leaving a neat desk every night and a to-do list ready for the morning. Marina, from the evidence laid out in front of me, was very different. My office looked as if a bomb had hit it. The desk was buried in correspondence and documents, files littered the floor and there were heaps of papers on every surface – not neat stacks which I could have forgiven, but chaotic-looking piles. I was appalled to see an Oak takeaway coffee carton on the desk and, Jesus, was that a chocolate wrapper between two title deeds? My skin prickled and my face flushed. Was I the one who was going to have to disentangle this mess?

I don’t know what my expression revealed but it was clearly not what I was thinking. Marina beamed at me as if the chaos showed what a good job she’d been doing, how hard she’d been working. I sighed. There was nothing for it but to dive in. I took a notepad and pen from the stationery shelf in the office next door and braved my office again, stepping over the debris on the floor and plonking myself down on one of the client chairs. Marina took my usual one at the desk, brushing the old coffee cup into the bin with her elbow.

“Okay,” I said through gritted teeth. “Bring me up to speed on where everything is on each file and I’ll ask questions if I have them.”

Two hours and three coffees later, my head was spinning. Not as badly as I’d expected it to be, but spinning, nonetheless. Thankfully, despite the bombsite of an office, Marina appeared to be getting the work done, but by God did she have a different way of working to mine. To Leah’s too, I suspected. Leah was like me in that she ran a very organized office; it was one of the reasons we worked well together. I wondered if Marina had driven her demented while I was away. Her glance at the floor as Marina had abandoned her umbrella made sense to me now.

I sat back in my chair as Marina upended the final file in a way that made me wince. Naturally all its contents fell out, tumbling onto the floor beneath the desk. Oblivious to my pain, she bent down, gathered the documents up in an untidy sheaf and shoved them back onto the file.