Eva could remember coming into the headquarters with her mother when she was a child, how full of people it had always seemed. There were several desks in the room back then, though people rarely sat at them, preferring the comfy chairs and low sofas arranged all around for volunteers and visitors. They came to help with campaigns, sometimes, to raise awareness. They came because they needed to talk or because they were unsure, because the facts seemed to say one thing while their instincts were saying another. They came with ideas and with doubts and her mother offered a place where they could be shared, and where they would be welcomed. Where had they all gone, those people?

We are women, her mother would always begin.

And then, four years ago today, her mother had died.

An old-fashioned stapler. A note pad, phone recharger, pens, some letters of support from years ago, all went into the bag along with today’s post and her favourite chipped coffee mug with the half-handle that no one else could hold. She checked her email, though she didn’t know why she was bothering. Clicked through to watch the latest vlog from FullLife: another beaming couple, another newborn. The comments had been disabled. Below that, an interview with the FullLife director calmly reassuring everyone that nothing had been stolen during the break-in last week. Eva stared at her face. At her smiling, lying face. They had probably been going for the newly released covers. The ones that everyone wanted, and some could not afford.

She imagined the laptop making a sigh as it shut down, though it was perfectly silent. She slipped it into her bag. There was hardly any furniture left. The single empty desk and chair she would leave for whomever it was that came next. They would know nothing about her. Or her mother.

She stood up and pulled the bag onto her back.

How easy it was, to bring something to an end.

As she walked to the station, no idea what she was going to do next, Eva found herself standing underneath the railway bridge, looking up.

One hundred thousand lemmings can’t be wrong.

That’s what it had said – Eva remembered it from when she was a child, though she hadn’t heard the phrase for years. How had they done it, she’d wanted to know, how had they hung one-armed off a bridge and maintained stability enough to write? Such determination to break the law must come from somewhere. And now, standing under the same bridge, painted a soothing pale green – it was the most relaxing colour to view, and so it had become a very popular colour to use – her eyes searched under the layers of paint, under the years, the decades, for that same scrawl.

It was gone, of course.