‘Of course.’ I looked at him. He looked different. I remembered how he’d looked before, how I’d never thought he was cute but I used to spend hours just gazing at him. ‘You know me.’

I used to think he had the most amazing eyebrows. Now they just looked like eyebrows, one cocked up in a way that I used to think was sexy but now just looked over-rehearsed. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said.

My cigarette had gone out but there wasn’t enough of it left to bother relighting it, so I tossed my butt at the sand bucket by the door and stood up. ‘See you in there.’

He exhaled, the smoke smudging his face like a thumbprint on a photograph. ‘Okay, Nona.’

I’d never even been to Sawyer’s before I came in for my interview, never really been in this part of Pyrmont, quietly tucked away between the eighties gaudiness of Darling Harbour and the sprawl of the fish markets. I’d expected something showier and I’d walked past the converted terrace twice before noticing the gold lettering on the front window, the dark, heavy door. The dining room was long and narrow and intimate, like someone’s front parlour, if that someone was filthy rich and wanted you to know it, with a long, mahogany bar along one side and a row of antique industrial cage lanterns down the middle. It was designed to impress, to intimidate, and it did. Most newbs would start their first shift whispering out of respect. I’d never been one of them; it was a restaurant, nothing more. Still, sometimes when I touched the bar I was almost overwhelmed by how solid it was.

When I got to the floor the fluoros were on and there was a waitress I half recognised laying out cutlery and Nic was training a newb on the computer. He glanced up and gestured at the bar with his chin.

‘Thanks,’ I mouthed.

Nic was my boss. Lenny had hired me but Nic had trained me and somewhere amid the dozens of questions I’d asked him and the hundreds of nights when we’d thought we were going to get eaten alive by Eastern Suburbs power couples and the many, many after-work drinks we’d shared, rolling from pub to pub before ending up dancing in some weird club or a stranger’s lounge room, we’d become friends. If anyone knew where the sock in my bag had come from, it would be Nic.