Paula was a tall, thin handsome women in her fifties, with aviator glasses and blonde hair pulled back to the nape of her neck. When she wasn’t at her desk she could usually be found sitting on the outside table near the printing office, smoking a cigarette and talking to either Saffy or one of the women in Accounting. I had always thought of her as strong and sensible, the last person I would expect to die as she did.

Once the shock wore off, I wouldn’t say I felt anything deeply. That would be presumptuous. I’d not known Paula well enough. What I did feel was regret that it was someone I’d liked so much, and the sense that learning about it made things not quite right.

In Portia’s office with its glass walls and firmly shut glass door, I learned what had happened. Paula had gotten sick with the flu a couple of months before, and could not seem to shake it. She kept coughing, kept getting sick and having to stay home. They told her to see a doctor, and she told them she had, would even describe in elaborate detail what the doctor had said and what kind of treatment she was undergoing. Her last day of work had been the previous Tuesday. That night — or some night later that week, I don’t know which — her husband had driven her to the hospital, where she died.

“She was a smoker,” Portia said, her large, limpid eyes looking larger and even more limpid than usual. “And it affected her lungs.”

“And she hadn’t seen a doctor at all!,” she added. “Her husband told me she hadn’t seen one in over a year.”