Level P3

P3 is where you park if you're staying past six, because the rate changes and nobody who works in the building is still here.

The air is cool and damp and smells like exhaust and something sweeter underneath it, which I've decided is old oil and would rather not investigate.

I say her name and the ramp gives it back three times, each one shorter than the last.

She comes out from behind the column by the elevators. The emergency lights are on the sodium setting so everything is the colour of a bad photograph, and she has her keys already in her hand.

Her footsteps are the clearest sound in the building. Heel, then the rest of the foot. Twelve of them.

"I tried to text."

The garage: text, tex, texxx.

We both hear it. She almost laughs.

That's the conversation, more or less. Whatever I came down here to say, the room said it back to me at a lower volume until it wasn't worth saying.

Her car chirps two rows over. Mine's on P2. We say goodbye standing four feet apart and it comes off the ceiling twice, like someone else agreeing.