He hadn’t intended to stay so late. As warm water sluiced over his head and shoulders, Paul’s muscles groaned with what should have been the satisfying burn of a good workout, but smacked more of cramp and middle age. Hopefully, after a glass of wine at home, his exhaustion would cozy itself around him, like a sleep-inducing blanket. Or maybe he’d find himself in one of those states where his body felt drained while his mind was under-stimulated. These days, the closest he got to a mental workout was this shower spitting hot and cold, requiring deft nudges of the dial. Paul imagined he was trying to outsmart it, predicting and pouncing on its next temperature lurch.

Striding out of the gym, he glanced at his office building across the road, looking fittingly two-dimensional against the black sky. analytics solutions blared neon above the rows of windows. How could a building with so many windows seem to have so little natural light when you were inside? Paul looked away, but realized too late that one of his younger colleagues was beelining toward him, his hand lifted in a static wave. As they walked together to the car park, Ollie kept mentioning that he’d been working late (“I just can’t walk away from an incomplete spreadsheet, can you?”). Paul counted the number of buzzwords that Ollie sprinkled into his monologue, his favorite phrase seeming to be “going forward.” Going forward, he reckoned they ought to have a regular spot for “blue sky thinking” in all their meetings, and going forward he wanted to see what the new “resource” in their team would “bring to the table.”

Paul was a bit of a mystery to his colleagues, he suspected. And he had to admit that a part of him reveled in that. Even the co-workers he liked saw only a cardboard cutout: Paul the semi-senior data analyst, a man of few words and an uncluttered desk, photos of his family nestling in his drawer. He gazed out of the window in meetings, never got involved in office politics, failed to show excitement about the layout of an evaluation form or a new policy on shredding. Yet he was unfazed by any task he was given, and had noticed how everyone leaned forward attentively on the occasions he did voice his opinion. Perhaps that was why he’d been promoted three times in his ten years there, despite surely appearing unambitious. He knew they all wondered what he’d done before joining Analytics Solutions, what he was like outside their open-plan office, which reeked of microwaved lunches and photocopier ink.

“Up to much tonight?” Ollie asked as they prepared to branch off to their separate cars.