He stopped packing. He stood very still for a moment. Then he said, without turning around: "I'll tell you that when you need to know it." And he left.
She sat at the empty cubicle and looked at the corridor. It was, at this hour, longer than the directory said it should be. She measured it with her eyes and estimated the discrepancy at approximately four metres. The four metres of corridor led to a pantry door that was exactly where it should be and opened onto a pantry that was exactly the right size and she had been there a hundred times.
Where did the extra four metres go? Or where did they come from?
She went to get chai and counted the steps and wrote the number in her notebook and went back to work. Documentation was documentation. The numbers would tell her something, eventually. Numbers always did.
