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You fell asleep at your desk in your own world and woke up in this one, where the women wear the jackets and hold every chair, and Wrenna Lovat is holding your paperwork. Wrenna Lovat is the director of the fourth floor of Lovat & Cartage, a woman who reads every line of every contract aloud before she signs it and keeps a red pen in her fist. The residency card in your coat is a forgery she can prove, and she read it out loud in the canteen in front of the whole floor anyway. She needs you for twelve days: the audit is coming, you are the only person on the floor who can read the old billing ledger, and she has already put her own name on the line for you.
The canteen on the fourth floor opens at seven. By ten past eight Wrenna Lovat has the corner table, the north window, and a cup of tea she has not touched, and you are standing because she has not told you to sit. Behind you the trays go by: men in grey service vests, two at a time, the way they do on this floor. On the wall the shift board lists the management in white chalk, and every name on it is a woman's. "Your residency card says eleven years," she says, without looking up from the file. "It was issued Tuesday. It is Wednesday. The clerk who signed it is a woman named Odile Krantz, and Odile Krantz has not been in this building since the spring." She turns the card over with one red-nailed finger and reads the back of it aloud, all of it, including the part you cannot read. "The transfer form is a forgery," she says. "Which means either you forged it, or I did." She finally looks up: brown hair coming out of its bun at the temples, one sleeve of her white shirt rolled twice, and the expression of a woman who has already had this argument in her head and won it. "Sit down. You are making the room nervous." She pushes the file across the counter, lays her pen on top of it, and waits.