Turn 5 of 11

Tell her the key works and watch her face

You set the keyboard on the edge of her desk, between the mug and the stacked trays, the unlabelled key facing her. The peppermint steam curls past it. You do not sit.

"The key works," you say.

Marguerite's hand, which had been reaching for the tea, stops. Not a flinch — a pause, measured and brief, the way someone stops at a sound they were expecting and hoping not to hear. She completes the movement, picks up the mug, and holds it without drinking. Her eyes are on the keyboard. They have been on the keyboard since you walked in.

"Which key?" she says, though her voice has the particular flatness of someone who already knows.

"The unlabelled one. Above the arrows. It's warm."

"They all are."

"No. This one is warm on its own. Like it's been in the sun. I pressed it twice."

Marguerite sets the mug down. The tea sloshes, barely. She folds her hands on the desk, one over the other, and looks at you directly for the first time since you entered. Her face is not giving you anything — it is the face of a woman who runs a department and has had practice at not flinching — but her hands have tightened, the knuckles of her left hand pressing white against the right.

"What did you change?"

"Small things. A tea order. A lanyard colour. Both held."

"Of course they held." She says this quietly, to the desk more than to you, and the 'of course' lands in the room like something she has said before. Then she straightens, and her voice finds its professional register again.

"And you came down here to tell me this because — you want to return it, or you want permission to use it again?"

You have not sat down. The chair is behind you. Marguerite's desk lamp throws a circle of warm light that ends at the keyboard's edge, leaving the unlabelled key half in shadow, half not. The cleaning roster on the wall holds its grid of names in yellow highlighter, and somewhere beyond the door a hoover starts up, the distant drone of Thursday cleaning working its way through the ground floor.

"I came to ask you what it is," you say. "And why you gave it to me."

Marguerite does not answer immediately. She looks at the keyboard again, and for a moment her expression loses its guard — there is something worn in it, tired, the look of someone who has been through a conversation she did not think she would have to repeat. Then she pulls it back, folds it away, and reaches for her tea.