The Wait

"There's a particular cruelty to clocks when you're waiting for something you can't name. Every minute becomes a small act of endurance."

The cursor blinked at me with rhythmic indifference.

I had been staring at the same email for—I glanced at the clock in the corner of my screen—twenty-three minutes. The words refused to coalesce into meaning, each sentence dissolving the moment my eyes moved to the next, leaving no trace of comprehension in their wake. Something about stakeholder requirements. Something about system integration timelines. The Inteq OneGov upgrade, that sprawling state-wide initiative to consolidate fragmented service portals into a single unified platform, demanded my attention with bureaucratic insistence.

I couldn't give it.

The draft requirements document sat open in another tab, its hundred-plus pages of technical specifications representing weeks of collaborative effort from analysts across three departments. Normally, I could skim through this material, identifying gaps and inconsistencies while simultaneously composing diplomatic feedback that wouldn't offend the original authors. It was a skill I'd cultivated over years of government work—the ability to critique without antagonising, to suggest improvements without implying incompetence.

Today, the words blurred together like watercolours left in the rain. Legacy integrations. Data migration protocols. User acceptance testing frameworks. Each phrase registered as individual sounds rather than meaningful concepts, as though the document had been written in a language I'd once spoken fluently but had somehow forgotten overnight.

Compared to the mystery of Seth's cryptic note, all of it felt like static.

I shifted in my chair, crossing my legs at the ankle. The position felt wrong almost immediately, a vague discomfort radiating up through my lower back. I uncrossed them, planted both feet flat on the floor. Worse. I tucked my left foot beneath me, then my right, then abandoned the attempt entirely and stretched both legs out beneath my desk until my shoes bumped against the modesty panel with a soft thud.

The woman at the desk diagonal to mine—Patricia? Priscilla? I could never remember—glanced up at the sound, her expression flickering with mild irritation before returning to her screen. I mouthed an apology she didn't see and retracted my legs, folding them back into something approximating a normal seated position.

Nine-seventeen. I had been at my desk for barely an hour, and already the morning stretched behind me like a week.

The office was beginning to fill now, that gradual accumulation of bodies and voices that transformed the early-morning sanctuary into something busier, louder, more demanding. Colleagues arrived in clusters, dropping bags and exchanging weekend anecdotes, their conversations washing over me in waves I couldn't quite parse. Someone was talking about a cricket match. Someone else mentioned a restaurant in North Hobart, the new one with the degustation menu, apparently worth the wait for a booking. Normal things. Ordinary things. The stuff of regular Wednesday mornings.

I checked my phone again. The message to Seth remained suspended in digital limbo—sent but undelivered, that single grey tick unchanged since I'd first noticed its stubborn solitude. I had checked perhaps fifteen times in the past hour, each glance a small act of magical thinking, as though my attention might somehow compel a response into existence.

Nothing.

I opened a new browser tab and typed Seth's name into the search bar, then immediately deleted it, alarmed by my own impulse. What did I expect to find? A news article explaining everything? An obituary? The thought sent ice water through my veins, and I pushed back from my desk as though the computer itself had become dangerous.

This was absurd. Seth had left a note asking to meet for lunch—unusual, yes, but hardly cause for the kind of catastrophic thinking currently colonising my mind. People left notes. People asked for discretion. There were a hundred innocent explanations, any one of which was more plausible than the dark scenarios my imagination insisted on constructing.

And yet.

Don't ask questions. Don't tell anyone.

Those weren't the words of someone planning to share good news over a chicken schnitzel. Those were the words of someone who had calculated the risks of communication and determined that digital channels couldn't be trusted. The words of someone operating, however temporarily, outside the normal parameters of friendship.

I stood up. Sat down. Stood up again. My body couldn't seem to find a configuration that didn't feel like waiting, and waiting had become intolerable. The nervous energy that had manifested as a bounce in my step a few hours ago had curdled into something more restless, more agitated—a physical manifestation of psychological disturbance that refused to be suppressed.

The clock read nine-thirty-two.

Two and a half hours. One hundred and fifty minutes. Nine thousand seconds. Each unit of measurement felt equally impossible, equally endless, a sentence to be served in increments of mounting anxiety.

I forced myself to focus on the requirements document, scrolling through pages I'd already failed to comprehend, searching for some anchor point that might tether my attention to the task at hand. Section 4.2.3: Authentication Protocols. The words swam before me, technical jargon arranging and rearranging itself into configurations that stubbornly refused to communicate meaning.

The system shall support multi-factor authentication via SMS, email, and authenticator application...

SMS. Text messages. The normal way people communicated when they wanted to reach someone quickly. Not Post-it notes left on desks in buildings they had no legitimate reason to enter.

I closed the document and opened it again, as though the act of refreshing might somehow refresh my capacity for concentration. It didn't. The same impenetrable sentences stared back at me, patient and indifferent to my distress.

Thankfully, most people were still away on their Christmas and New Year break, leaving the office in that peculiar state of post-festive limbo where nothing felt entirely real or entirely urgent. Skeleton crew. That was the phrase, wasn't it? The minimal staffing that kept essential functions operational while the majority of the workforce recovered from holiday excess.

The skeleton crew suited my current state perfectly. Fewer eyes to notice my distraction, fewer conversations to fake my way through, fewer opportunities for someone to ask if I was feeling all right and force me to manufacture a plausible response. I could sit here and slowly disintegrate, and no one would be any the wiser.

Ten-fifteen.

The morning inched forward with the enthusiasm of a glacier, each minute depositing itself into the past with excruciating reluctance. I had accomplished nothing—less than nothing, if that were mathematically possible. My inbox had accumulated seven new messages since I'd arrived, and I had opened precisely none of them, their bold subject lines glaring at me like a row of small accusations.

The gentle hum of the air conditioning had evolved from background noise into a sort of white noise accompaniment to my churning thoughts. I found myself listening for patterns in its mechanical rhythm, searching for meaning in its random fluctuations like some desperate oracle seeking prophecy in the mundane. The system cycled through its programmed variations—softer, louder, softer again—and I tracked each shift with unwarranted attention, grateful for any distraction from the clock.

A phone rang somewhere across the office, its shrill tone cutting through the ambient murmur. I flinched, actually flinched, my shoulders jerking upward in a spasm of misdirected alertness. It wasn't my phone. Of course it wasn't. My phone sat silent on my desk, its screen dark, its inbox stubbornly empty of anything from the one person I needed to hear from.

Patricia-or-Priscilla glanced my way again, her expression now edging from mild irritation toward genuine concern. I arranged my features into something I hoped read as professional absorption rather than incipient breakdown, turning my attention to my monitor with exaggerated focus. The performance felt transparent, but she returned to her work without comment.

Ten-forty-seven.

I found myself cataloguing the ways in which time had betrayed me. How it had flowed so easily this morning—the walk from the bus stop, the café visit, the bounce through the streets—each moment melting into the next with liquid grace. And how it had congealed since the note, transforming into something viscous and unyielding, each second requiring effort to push through.

My leg had developed an involuntary bounce, my heel lifting and dropping against the thin carpet in a rhythm I couldn't seem to control. The movement was small enough to escape casual notice but persistent enough to become maddening. I pressed my palm against my thigh, willing the muscles to still, but the moment I released the pressure, the bouncing resumed.

Eleven-oh-three.

Fifty-seven minutes remaining, and the numbers seemed to mock me. I had watched clocks before—waiting for meetings to end, for workdays to conclude, for various anticipated events to arrive. But I had never experienced time quite like this, this granular awareness of each passing moment as a discrete unit of endurance.

The view from the window offered no comfort. The Derwent still sparkled in the late-morning light, the sailing boats still traced their leisurely paths across the harbour, but the scene felt like a photograph now—static, unreachable, belonging to a version of the morning that had ceased to exist. Mount Wellington remained hidden behind its curtain of cloud, the peak invisible, the mountain's usual reassuring presence replaced by absence.

I tried the breathing exercise I'd learned years ago from a counsellor—four counts in, hold for seven, out for eight. The rhythm was supposed to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, to convince the body that no threat was present even when the mind insisted otherwise. I made it through three cycles before abandoning the attempt. My lungs didn't want to cooperate, each inhalation feeling somehow insufficient, each exhalation incomplete.

Eleven-nineteen.

Forty-one minutes.

The requirements document still sat open on my screen, its cursor blinking with the same mechanical patience it had displayed all morning. I scrolled to a random page—Section 7.8: Data Retention Policies—and forced myself to read the first paragraph aloud in my mind, giving each word the emphasis of genuine attention.

The system shall retain user data for a minimum period of seven years following account closure, in accordance with...

My eyes slid off the text like water off glass. What did any of this matter? Who cared about data retention policies when Seth was out there somewhere, unreachable, having left a message that suggested something had gone seriously, fundamentally wrong?

I closed the document again. This time, I didn't bother reopening it.

Eleven-thirty arrived like a small mercy, the numbers on my computer screen changing over with what felt—finally—like forward momentum. Still thirty minutes until noon, but the psychological barrier of half-past-eleven felt significant somehow, a threshold crossed. I was in the final stretch now, the home straight, the last painful interval before answers became possible.

My mind thoroughly unsettled and utterly incapable of concentrating on anything remotely resembling work, I decided to leave for Cornerstone Café earlier than necessary. The café was barely a ten-minute walk from the office, but I couldn't bear to remain in this liminal space any longer. The walls seemed to be closing in with subtle persistence, the distance between my desk and the exit expanding with each passing minute—a spatial paradox that mirrored my psychological discomfort.

Besides, I told myself, standing up and pushing my chair under my desk with perhaps more force than strictly necessary, nobody here will even notice I'm gone.

The thought wasn't entirely truthful. Even with the skeleton crew, absences were noted, patterns were observed. The government office culture of Hobart possessed that particular quality of places where everyone knew everyone's business—not through malice, necessarily, but through the simple mathematics of a small city and a smaller professional community. Someone would notice. Someone would remember. But I couldn't bring myself to care.

I gathered my wallet and phone with movements that I desperately hoped appeared casual to any observing eyes. The phone's screen remained stubbornly notification-free, Seth's continued silence adding yet another disquieting layer to my growing anxiety. I slipped the device into my pocket, where it pressed against my thigh like a small weight of disappointment.

A glance out the window showed that the cloud cover had thickened since I'd last looked, the sky taking on that particular grey density that often preceded summer storms in Tasmania. The weather could shift so quickly here, the island's position in the path of the roaring forties making meteorological stability something of a local joke. Sunshine one moment, deluge the next, and back again before you'd had time to locate an umbrella.

The atmospheric pressure seemed to have dropped as well, that subtle heaviness in the air that some people claimed to feel before rain. I wasn't normally weather-sensitive, but today every environmental variable felt loaded with meaning, the universe apparently conspiring to match my internal state with appropriate external conditions.

I was halfway to the door when I heard it—that voice, familiar and sharp, cutting through the office murmur with the precision of someone who had spent years asking questions designed to dismantle comfortable assumptions.

"You going for coffee?"

Verity.

Of course it was Verity. She possessed an almost supernatural ability to materialise at precisely the wrong moment, her analytical mind perpetually tuned to the subtleties that others routinely missed. I had once watched her identify a discrepancy in a departmental budget by noticing that a colleague had hesitated slightly before answering a routine question. The error had been minor—a misallocated expense, nothing improper—but Verity had spotted the hesitation and followed it to its source with the tenacity of a bloodhound tracking a scent.

Now that same attention was trained on me, and I felt suddenly, horribly exposed.

I stopped, my hand already extended toward the door handle, the metal cold against my fingers. The chill seemed to travel up my arm, matching the sudden coolness spreading through my chest. I turned slowly, assembling my features into what I hoped was an expression of casual unconcern.

Verity stood a few metres away, a manila folder tucked under one arm, her head tilted at that characteristic angle she adopted when something had caught her interest. Her eyes—that particular shade of grey-green that seemed to change with the light—moved across my face with methodical attention, cataloguing details I would have preferred to keep hidden.

She wasn't merely a colleague. Over the years, Verity had evolved into something of a work confidante, her sharp intelligence and bone-dry humour making her excellent company for lunch breaks and after-work drinks. We had spent countless hours dissecting office politics, debating the relative merits of various restaurants, and sharing the kind of personal details that accumulate between people who spend forty hours a week in the same space.

Which made this unavoidable moment of necessary deception all the more uncomfortable, like lying to a family member about something that shouldn't require lying.

"Early lunch," I replied, glancing over my shoulder, desperately attempting to maintain an even tone.

Verity's eyebrow rose approximately three millimetres—a movement so slight that most people wouldn't have registered it, but which I had learned to recognise as a significant indicator of scepticism. Her forensic accounting background had never quite switched off; reading people and their attempts at concealment was simply part of how she processed the world.

"Want some company?" she enquired, her voice projecting studied casualness. But there was nothing remotely casual about the way her eyes flickered meticulously over my face, mapping the tension I was trying so desperately to conceal. I could almost see her mental filing system at work, cross-referencing my current behaviour against the baseline of normal-Nathan she had accumulated over years of observation.

A dry gulp caught in my throat like a physical manifestation of guilt.

I was normally the first person to enthusiastically embrace the opportunity to either accompany someone for lunch or have them join me. Our shared lunch breaks had evolved into something of an office tradition—a sacrosanct time for discussing everything from weekend plans to the labyrinthine complexities of interdepartmental feuds. Verity and I had analysed colleagues' romantic entanglements, debated the strategic implications of various management decisions, and occasionally drifted into more personal territory, sharing fragments of our lives outside these walls.

My refusal now would be tantamount to raising a glaring crimson flag to her already suspicious mind. And yet the words on that yellow note pulsed in my memory with imperative force: Don't tell anyone.

"I... I need some personal time," I stammered awkwardly, the words sounding pathetically false even to my own ears.

Personal time. As though I ever requested such a thing. My usual approach to problems was to talk them through exhaustively, to process aloud with whoever would listen, to convert anxiety into language until it became manageable. Verity had been the recipient of countless such verbal downloads—work frustrations, family complications, the occasional romantic disappointment. She knew my patterns better than almost anyone.

Which meant she would know immediately that this excuse was a fabrication.

Her eyes narrowed perceptibly, adopting that characteristic expression her analytical gaze assumed when she was meticulously scrutinising something—or someone—that didn't quite add up. I'd witnessed that look directed at spreadsheets with suspicious numerical patterns, at expense reports with implausible figures, at colleagues whose explanations contained too many qualifiers and not enough substance.

Rarely at me.

The weight of her penetrating gaze made me feel exposed in a way that had nothing to do with professional competence. This wasn't about work performance or project deliverables. This was personal, and Verity was too perceptive not to recognise the distinction.

"Fine."

The word hung in the air between us, neither acceptance nor dismissal but something more complex—an acknowledgment that I was lying, coupled with a decision not to pursue the truth. At least not now. The manila folder remained tucked under her arm, her posture unchanged, but something in her expression had shifted. A small withdrawal, perhaps. The recognition of a boundary being erected where none had previously existed.

"See you later this afternoon, then," she continued, her tone maintaining a studied neutrality that I recognised as its own form of communication. There would be questions later. There would be a conversation I couldn't avoid, gentle but persistent, probing the edges of whatever I was hiding until the truth emerged. Verity's curiosity, once properly piqued, was like water finding its way through rock—patient, inexorable, ultimately impossible to resist.

But that was a problem for later-Nathan. Present-Nathan had a café to reach and a friend to meet.

"For sure," I replied with brightness I didn't feel, already turning from the unbearable awkwardness and pushing the door open with perhaps more urgency than the situation outwardly warranted. The soft whoosh of the automatic closer behind me felt like a temporary reprieve, but I knew better than to imagine this was the conclusion of the matter.

The corridor stretched ahead like a gauntlet, though in objective reality it was entirely empty save for the usual institutional furnishings—the dying potted palm by the fire escape, the motivational posters with their relentlessly upbeat messaging, the water cooler that no one ever seemed to use but which was nonetheless refilled with religious regularity.

My footsteps echoed against the polished floor as I walked, each sound seeming to broadcast my departure to the entire building. The rhythm felt too fast, too urgent, the pace of someone fleeing rather than simply leaving for lunch. I forced myself to slow down, to adopt the unhurried gait of a person with nothing to hide and nowhere particularly pressing to be.

The performance felt transparent. But there was no possibility of retreat now.

As I approached the lift, I found myself checking my phone once more, as though sheer force of will might conjure a message from the digital void. The screen illuminated briefly, revealing nothing but the time—eleven-forty-one—and my home screen wallpaper, a photograph of the Hobart waterfront at sunset that now felt like an artefact from some distant, uncomplicated past.

The blank notification bar reflected my own troubled expression back at me, the glass surface catching my face in miniature—eyes too wide, jaw too tight, the pleasant morning completely erased by hours of accumulated dread.

I pressed the call button. The lift announced its arrival with a soft chime.

Nineteen minutes until noon.

The doors opened onto the empty cabin, and I stepped inside, watching my distorted reflection multiply across the mirrored walls. An infinite regression of worried Nathans, each one slightly smaller, slightly more distant, disappearing into some vanishing point that felt suddenly, uncomfortably relevant.

Whatever was waiting for me at Cornerstone Café, whatever had driven Seth to leave that note in that way at that time, I would know soon enough.

The doors closed, and the lift began its descent.