By the time I got to Nora's apartment, my coat had absorbed enough April rain to qualify as a second coat.
A worse coat.
My left sock was wet, too, but only the left one, which felt personal. Somewhere between Sherbrooke and her building, Montreal had found the exact crack in my boot and sent one cold little finger through it.
My phone was at twelve percent. I had spent the whole walk texting Nora.
Sophie, 9:02 PM: I need to see you RIGHT NOW.
Sophie, 9:02 PM: Not dying.
Sophie, 9:03 PM: Emotionally maybe.
Sophie, 9:03 PM: There is a man at work.
Sophie, 9:03 PM: Actually no. Calling him a man feels generous.
Sophie, 9:04 PM: Nora.
Sophie, 9:04 PM: NORA.
Nora, 9:05 PM: Door's open.
That was friendship: someone unlocking the door and removing alcohol from the room before you arrived.
I pushed inside with my hip.
"I know it's late, I know, I'm sorry, but câlisse, I need you to tell me I am not insane."
Nora stood in the kitchen doorway in leggings and one of Ethan's sweatshirts. There was a loose thread hanging from the cuff. I noticed it immediately and then, for no reason, hated it. It was just hanging there, calm, while my entire professional identity had been backed over by a man with excellent posture.
Behind her, the TV murmured. The apartment smelled like garlic and laundry detergent and people who had eaten dinner at a table.
Ethan appeared behind her with a mug.
Tea.
Of course.
Nora had absolutely told him not to give me wine.
"You good?" he asked.
"No."
He didn't push. He handed me the mug, squeezed my shoulder once, and disappeared down the hall.
I registered it. Kind. Solid. Very Ethan.
Then I remembered the work event and the man who had ended it for me without even raising his voice.
Nora pointed at the couch.
"Sit."
"I can't sit."
"You're sitting."
"I'm vibrating."
"You can vibrate seated," Nora said.
I opened my mouth.
Then I sat.
The tea burned my tongue on the first sip. I glared into the mug. Bagel, who had either been visiting or had negotiated shared custody of Nora's apartment, shoved his orange head under my wrist.
I scratched him too hard. He shoved his head harder into my hand.
Nora curled into the armchair across from me. She didn't ask who. She didn't ask what happened. She just waited until I started confessing things to make it stop.
I lasted eight seconds.
"There are some people," I said, "where you look at them and you just know they think you're stupid."
Her eyebrows moved.
"Not wrong. Not loud. Not annoying. Stupid. Like he'd already decided what I was before I opened my mouth."
"Had he?"
"He didn't seem to need the rest."
"Mm."
"And the worst part is, I was winning."
That got her. A tiny shift. Barely anything.
I pointed at her with the mug. "Don't do that."
"What?"
"The face."
"I have a face?"
"You have several. This is the one where you think I'm leaving something out."
"You usually are."
"Not this time. This is an attack."
Bagel's tail hit my wrist once. I looked down and realized I was still wearing my work badge.
I had walked fifteen minutes through wet April sludge with my company photo hanging around my neck like a tiny laminated accusation.
I yanked it off so fast the clip caught in my hair.
"Okay," I said. "I was winning a corporate team-building event, which should have been legally impossible, and then Legal developed a personality."
Nora's mouth closed.
Exactly.
Corporate team building was never neutral. It was what leadership called it when departments had stopped communicating except through forwarded emails and the phrase "looping in legal."
This one had been at a Plateau bar with brick walls, low lights, and cocktails named after emotions. I don't remember what I ordered. Something with gin.
At first, it was grim.
Legal near the windows. Accounts near the food. Creative pretending we were not judging everyone's shoes. At the far end of the legal cluster, one man sat with his back straight and his drink untouched, as if the bar had accidentally rented space inside a compliance review.
I noticed him because he was impossible not to notice.
Then I chose not to.
My own Strategy team had taken the good end before I got there and failed to save me a seat. Rude. That was my end. My ecosystem. My tiny, stupid kingdom.
Amélie was there too.
Our Amélie. Same department, same level, same projects whenever management wanted to "create healthy internal challenge," which is corporate for making two women smile at each other while quietly measuring the same chair.
Her hair sat in one smooth sheet over her shoulder. Mine did that for twelve minutes after a salon appointment and then remembered humidity existed. She held sparkling water in one hand like it had been issued to her by a luxury brand and gave me the exact colleague smile. Millimeter-precise. No teeth wasted.
I smiled back because I have survived in offices before.
I have manners. Selectively.
"Was he already there?" Nora asked.
"Who?"
She looked at me.
"The personality."
"Right. Him. Yes. Unfortunately." I took another sip of the tea and did not burn myself this time. "Sitting with legal, obviously. New head of client legal and risk. Pierre-André Sainte-Rose."
"The Maude guy."
"The Maude guy." My voice did something small and ugly on her name, so I took another sip.
Maude wasn't Nora. She wasn't even my closest work friend, technically. She was the kind of work friend who knew which bathroom had the best lighting and who could rescue a budget meeting with one laugh. Two weeks ago, she had been "restructured."
And the person attached to that language was him.
Pierre-André. P.A., apparently.
Before tonight, I had assumed that stood for Pierre-André.
I had revised my position.
"Pain in the ass?" Nora said.
"Pain in the ass."
Bagel sneezed.
"Thank you," I told him. "Exactly."
For a while, I did great.
I said hello to accounts. I complimented Daria's green glass earrings. I asked Olivier from creative about his kitchen renovation, which was risky because Olivier can turn one tile question into a municipal hearing, but his shoulders dropped, and the creative table stopped looking like someone had placed them there as punishment.
Then Sébastien from client services tried to tell a story about a meeting with Lumière Bare and got three sentences in before the whole thing began dying in front of us.
You know when a story starts losing air? First one person checks their phone. Then someone takes too long with a sip. Then the person telling it hears himself failing and starts adding details, which is the social equivalent of throwing furniture onto a sinking boat.
Sébastien was drowning.
No one had asked me to help.
I helped.
"Wait, wait," I said, leaning in. "Was this the meeting where their CEO said 'ingredient transparency' six times and then refused to tell us what was in the ingredient deck?"
The table laughed.
Sébastien blinked, then grabbed the rope. "Yes. Exactly. She kept saying 'proprietary botanical blend' like it was a spell."
"It was a spell," I said. "A spell to summon legal."
That got legal to look over. Not P.A. Not yet. Two of the juniors smiled into their drinks. One of them actually laughed.
Sébastien's face changed. Not much, but enough. He sat taller. Got his rhythm back.
See? Useful.
I did not say that part out loud to Nora.
Maybe I did. I don't remember. I remember her thumb moving over the chipped rim of her mug. That little blue ceramic one from the market near campus, the one she bought second year because she said it looked like it could hold bad feelings. It had a crack now, thin and brown at the edge.
"Sophie," Nora said.
"What?"
"You skipped something."
"No, I didn't."
"Mm."
"I edited for pacing."
"Mm."
"Fine. Maybe I saved Seb's story."
"Maybe."
"Don't make it sound pathological."
She said nothing.
"It was not pathological. It was generous."
Still nothing.
"Generous-adjacent."
"Continue."
So I continued, because that was also friendship.
Once Sébastien recovered, the room loosened. Drinks arrived. Someone from accounts tried to bend an icebreaker card between two fingers and failed. I took the stack and read the prompts to the junior legal table.
Share a time you overcame a challenge.
"Dangerous."
What is one thing your coworkers don't know about you?
"Absolutely not."
"Once answered, it no longer qualifies," P.A. said from the far end.
Tell us about a travel mishap.
Now that was a prompt.
"No," Nora said.
"You don't even know what I said."
"Barcelona."
"I don't appreciate being predictable."
"You love being predictable when it gets a laugh."
"That is different. That is a known strength."
She gave me the look again.
"Okay, yes. Barcelona."
Nora closed her eyes.
"You did the key story at a work event."
"The prompt asked for travel mishaps."
In the bar, no one knew where it was going yet. That was the fun part.
I stood up. I tell stories better with my hands.
"So there I am," I told them, "in Barcelona, running late for a flight, sweating through a shirt that had previously been part of my identity, carrying a tote bag that should not have been trusted with my passport."
Someone from accounts made a sympathetic noise.
"I get to my Airbnb. I find my door. I take out the key. I put the key in."
I acted it out.
"And the lock says no."
Daria laughed first.
"But I am an optimist," I said, "and by optimist I mean a woman with a boarding time and no emotional flexibility. So I try again."
I twisted both hands around an imaginary key.
"Harder."
Olivier covered his mouth.
"Then I check the little brass number beside the door and realize two things at the exact same time. One: I am on the wrong floor. Two: the key is now part of someone else's door."
"What did you do?" Olivier said, delighted.
"I left."
"You left the key?"
"The key was stuck."
"You didn't call anyone?"
"I called a man from the next landing who was carrying oranges."
"Oranges?"
"He looked competent."
He had not been competent. He had put down the oranges, tried the key, said something in Spanish that did not sound optimistic, and then patted the door like the door was grieving.
At which point I called the Airbnb manager, said a series of things that began in English and ended in noises, convinced him to open my actual apartment, grabbed my suitcase, and left.
"You left the country," Daria said.
"I had a flight."
Daria laughed hard enough to squeak. Olivier covered his face. Around them, the rest of the table gave in.
And yes, okay, I loved it. The attention too, probably. But mostly I needed the room alive.
Maybe not a legal difference.
I did not look at legal when I said it.
That is a lie. I looked once.
Most of them were laughing. Even the juniors. Even the woman with the severe middle part who had spent half the evening treating the appetizer tray like evidence.
P.A. was not laughing.
He sat at the far end of the legal cluster with one forearm resting on the table and his glass in the other hand. Navy blazer. White shirt. No tie, which somehow made him look more formal, not less. There are men who remove a tie and become relaxed. He removed a tie and became a deposition.
His black coils were cropped close. The long, clean lines of his face did not move with the room.
Not cold. That would be too easy.
Attentive. Still. Like he had put everything in the room into separate labeled folders and was waiting for one of them to incriminate itself.
I already hated that he had a good voice.
I hated that more than I hated the blazer.
So I looked away.
I had a room to hold.
"Anyway," I told the table, "I did what any responsible adult would do."
"Called the host?" someone asked.
"Changed my name and left the country."
More laughter.
I gave them the good version. The quick version. The version with my panic and the key and the stairwell and my tragic inability to distinguish one apartment door from another under pressure.
I did not include the exact building. I did not include the floor. I did not include the part where I had been rushing because a friend of a friend needed blister patches from an open pharmacy before her night train.
My version needed me to be an idiot.
I was happy to serve.
"Happy," Nora repeated.
"Pacing," I said.
"Right."
The laughter kept building. It had that tiny drag first, the resistance, and then suddenly the thing lifted.
I know rooms. I know when people are with me. I know who is laughing because they mean it and who is laughing because their boss is.
At that table, for about ninety seconds, everyone meant it.
Even Amélie laughed.
Not fully. Let's not get wild. But she did the colleague version: head tilted, mouth open just enough, sparkling water held away from her body to protect the outfit. Her eyes flicked once toward P.A., then back to me.
I clocked it.
Of course I clocked it.
Then Olivier lifted his glass and said, "To Sophie, international menace."
"To border control," I said.
"To locks everywhere," Daria added.
The table cheered.
For one clean second, the whole awful team-building machine worked. Legal laughed with creative. Accounts talked to strategy. Sébastien was alive again. The bar lights made everyone look warmer than they were.
My wet left sock, in Nora's apartment, chose that moment to go cold all over again.
"Wait," Nora said softly.
"What?"
"Your sock."
"What about my sock?"
"You're sitting on your foot."
I looked down. I was. My wet sock was pressed into her couch cushion.
"Oh my God." I yanked my foot out from under me. "Sorry."
She handed me a throw blanket without comment.
This is why I loved her. She could interrupt a public execution story to save her upholstery.
"Continue," she said.
So.
Back to the bar.
Back to the laugh.
Back to me, standing there with one hand lifted, about to deliver what I thought was the last line.
The room was mine in the way you know a pan is hot before touching it.
Then P.A. moved.
Not dramatically. No chair scrape. No throat clear. He simply set his glass down.
The sound was tiny.
I heard it anyway.
He looked at me, and for one stupid second I noticed his cuffs. They were folded back once, perfectly even. Not rolled. Folded.
Then his mouth opened.
The laughter did not stop all at once. It thinned. First at legal. Then beside me. Then across the table, where Daria's smile stayed on her face half a beat too long because she had not yet received instructions from the air.
My hand was still lifted.
I had forgotten what I was doing with it.