Penny: You were fine. Really. Sounded extra confident. Like a boss.

Sam: I don’t think Tom bought it.

Penny: Tom? Are you kidding, Barbs? Tom LOVES you. Like actually loves you.

Sam: He does not, you maniac.

Penny: His aura changes when you speak. Vibrates.

Sam: His aura vibrates?

Penny: Trust me. I am attuned.

Sam: He is too old. Must be nearly 50.

Penny: There is nobody your age in this workshop. What did we say about being choosy?

Sam: “We” didn’t say anything. I said I wasn’t interested right now and, very specifically, that I wasn’t interested in anybody in this office.

Penny: Yes but we said you shouldn’t be choosy. Even with TDH. And now is the perfect time. The imminent waxing crescent. New beginnings. Possibilities.

Sam: Are you high right now, Pen? Please tell me you are either stoned or drunk or gave up your caffeine sabbatical and are struggling to deal with a double shot macchiato.

Penny: Clean and serene, Barbs. Clean and serene. The moon is my only mistress. Okay. Maybe the moon and Matthew McConaughey.

Sam: Alright, alright, alright. How is he your mistress?

Penny: Don’t be so gender normative. Me and Matthew would be mixing it all up.

Sam: Enough now. Do you know what’s going on?

Penny: Still reviewing the risk register. Ten more minutes and then I will buy you that coffee.

Sam toggled alt and tab on her keyboard, watched her Teams chat with Penny be replaced with a copy of the Powerpoint they were supposed to be following in the meeting. She glanced up at the larger TV screen in the meeting room where one of Tom’s auditors, she hadn’t clocked his name, had plugged his laptop in and was walking them through the content. She realised she was about three slides behind. Nobody seemed to have noticed, lost in a conversation about whether to extend the scope of the audit to include expenses. As she picked up the thread it largely served to remind her why she had zoned out and looked for the distraction with Penny.

The core group running the meeting were Tom, Head of Financial Controls, Richard, some guy from another part of Finance, and Henry, their external auditor from Deloitte. Early on in the process Penny had repeatedly tried to call Henry, Harry, just so that she could refer to them collectively as Tom, Dick, and Harry, but he had politely – and in the end firmly – insisted that his name was never intended to be anything other than Henry. It hadn’t stopped her consistently referring to them as TDH on every Teams exchange with Sam since. Exchanges like “WTF TDH” and “IDK TDH” had become far more common than “LOL TDH” or “FTW TDH” as the project had steadily unearthed more and more process anomalies that seemed to vex the auditors. Status ratings moved like traffic lights stuck permanently in reverse: green to amber to red.

“I’m still not comfortable that we close out the earlier points about salary sacrifice controls,” said Richard. “I don’t think flagging it as a requiring a minor mitigation is sufficient.”

“We covered this…” started Penny.

“It’s not your area,” said Richard. “Sam? I’m surprised you were so willing to shut this down.”

Sam felt her heart rate quicken. Unseen she curled her toes within her shoes, as if she could hook them into the ground beneath her seat. One of her fingers began to lightly tap on the surface of her laptop, just next to the trackpad. She watched it, tried to count each fourth tap, tried to focus on her breathing but all it served to do was make her more aware of the syncopation between the tapping, her heartbeat, and her now less steady inhalation and exhalation.

“We’ve logged it to follow up,” she said, forcing herself to look directly at him, maintaining eye contact until he looked back down at his screen. “Let’s keep moving, please, or we won’t cover everyone else’s items.”

“I just think…,”

“It’s done,” she snapped. Silence fell in the room. Sam could see Penny rapidly tapping out something on her keyboard and in her peripheral vision she registered a new notification in her Teams. She held Richard’s surprised gaze. More quietly now: “It’s done.”

“Let’s take that break,” said Tom. “Twenty minutes, grab a coffee, and then we can work through the rest of the agenda.”

Richard looked like he was about to interject again but Tom looked across at him and gave the slightest shake of his head, barely perceptible to anyone else. Penny clocked it. She had been holding an exaggerated focus on the others to disguise that her fingers were still flying over her keys, sending a series of concerned, supportive messages to Sam. (Penny: Hang in there Barbs. He’s literally a dick called Dick. Tom just shut him down, I told you he liked you.) Their recipient remained very still save for her persistently tapping finger which only ceased once the three men had left the room.

Sam excused herself as Penny began talking – exclamations broadly in keeping with her Teams message but with even less censorship – and left the room, headed back down a floor away from the Finance neighbourhood (when the offices had been refurbed Facilities had insisted on calling the various open plan zones where functions sat, neighbourhoods – Penny had spent the first week coming in wearing sunglasses and insisting that the entire second floor was her ‘hood). She found a vacant toilet, locked the door behind herself and engaged the hand dryer. She had expected to burst into tears and she was using the noise from the dryer purely as cover but something in its dissonant din seemed to calm her and so she stood, turning her hands over and over beneath the jet of air. She considered whether to run through her exercises to steady herself further but the prospect of naming five things she could see, five things she could hear, and five things she could smell, was too depressing. She could see herself in the mirror, a sink in front of her, a toilet behind her, a discarded sanitary towel wrapper that had fallen out of the bin, and a checklist on the door showing the two hourly intervals at which the room had been cleaned which confirmed it had been done twenty minutes ago. The sound of the dryer, as she intended, blotted everything else out and she refused to remove the focus of her nostrils from the lavender hand wash in a dispenser by the taps; it was slightly undercut by a too sharp, citrus disinfectant. Her breathing slowed.

Penny was waiting for her in the coffee shop, they still had ten minutes before the meeting was due to resume. She had bought her a drink – “you’re not back on oat, are you, because if you are then, sorry, but I just fucked up” – and was waiting with it in a corner. She put her phone down and smiled as Sam walked over, explained about the drink. Sam shook her head and sat down.

“I could set the fire alarm off?” said Penny. Sam looked up at her. “To crash the meeting. I reckon it’d waste another half an hour easy and then we just claim we’ve got something else that clashes.”

“It’s fine,” said Sam. “Really, it’s fine. I don’t know why it’s all getting so…”

“Tense?”

“I was going to go with panicky or anxious or worrying but tense is okay.” She sipped her coffee. “As long as I can spend a solid twenty to thirty minutes every day hiding in a toilet and recomposing myself then everything will be fine.”

“It’s just an audit,” said Penny. “I don’t understand why you’re taking it so personally. A bunch of grey men with grey lives checking up on the cool kids.”

“I run a tech stack that includes payroll, expenses, the order management system for this building’s canteen, and the software that runs office security. You work in HR. In payroll. If they’re checking up on the cool kids then they’re checking in the wrong place.”

“I still think office security sounds quite cool. You can see all the CCTV footage, right?”

“One last time, Pen. Yes, I can but, no, I don’t. And very definitely, no, you can’t.” Penny started to open her mouth. “Not even to watch yourself walking around the office to see who looks up from their desk as you go by.”

“Such an obvious use case,” sighed Penny. “You should absolutely do that for yourself. I suspect you’d be shocked at the attention you get.”

“Attention is not what I’m after right now. Not from anybody in this office. Not Tom before you start up with that again. I want to be invisible to everyone, maybe even to myself.”

“It’s still the new moon, Barbs, which is lucky for you as that’s when it’s invisible but it won’t stay like that for long.”

“Waxing crescent. You told me, several times. More like waxing lyrical. A sliver of it comes back into view. I understand the clunky analogy, Pen. Unlike you, though, I don’t believe my fate is tied up by the natural progression of celestial objects through space. Shit happens, or happened, and I need to deal with them. Some sleep, some control back over my own brain, and it’ll all be fine.”

“You’re being too rational about it all,” said Penny. “It’s a lot, what happened. Ben leaving. The tax stuff. That new arsehole starting above you.”

“The week that FOMS started duplicating orders and they got six hundred chicken breasts, two hundred tomatoes, and so much lettuce they gave everyone one to take home and still couldn’t fit it all in the fridges,” added Sam.

“Chicken salad week? Everyone loved that week. Or I did anyway, lost half a kilo. All I’m saying is that you’ve got a lot going on and maybe need to give yourself a break, not try to fix it all up here.” Penny tapped the side of her head to illustrate. “Give in to something you don’t understand. Even one of those celestial objects you’re so quick to dismiss.”

“Nine more days and it’s done, I just need to keep it together until then.”

“I’m going to the States then,” said Penny. “When it’s all done. I’m doing that California trip. Come with.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “The one where you’re going moon gazing with a bunch of hippies and men in cargo shorts with telescopes and their own fold away canvas chairs?”

“It does involve some time in Yosemite and the desert looking up at the ineffable reaches of space, yes.”

“Is that what the brochure says?”

“I need more time to sell it to you,” said Penny. “Me, you, hire car, the great highways of North America. Nature. Probably some ill advised cut off denim shorts. Come on, it’ll be great.”

“It sounds like Thelma and Louise…”

“Yeah. I’ll even let you have Brad Pitt when we meet him.”

“You know how that movie ends?”

“We write our own ending, Barbs. I promise you I won’t pitch us off the Grand Canyon. Even if they sack us for fucking up everyone’s expenses last year and that minor salmonella outbreak from chicken that had gone past its sell by date.”

“That was not my fault!” laughed Sam. “The system ordered it, sure, but the kitchen should’ve dealt with it after that.”

“Think about it,” said Penny.

“Later. I will. Come on, we’ve got to get back to TDH. They’ll think I’m stalling on ‘appropriate mitigations’ again.”

Penny looked at her. “We could do that. Or…” She reached her hand up behind her shoulder, ran her hand across the front of the fire alarm panel. “How much force do you need to break the glass in these anyway?”

Sam started to stand, reaching for Penny’s arm. She knocked her coffee over and jumped back from the pooling brown liquid spreading across the table, watched it begin to spill over the side and run like a waterfall to the floor. Penny put a finger to her lips, closed her eyes, and pressed hard against the glass. As the alarm began to echo around the building Penny stood, took Sam by the arm, and steadily walked them both towards the exit.

“Tell me you can delete the CCTV?”