The last time I saw Richard

"I don't know how it started - actually no, that's a lie I do know. It was when I first saw him. He was doing a public speaking engagement about ethics and the law. He was so callous, so funny, so-"

"Tall?"

Babs laughed taking a sip of her wine. "Yeah, that too."

"Go on." Greta tried to hide her yawn behind the back of her hand. She looked like a child that was overtired but didn't want to go bed. It was quiet, warm and dark in the small cafe they'd found near Trinity Bellwoods. It was also crammed with people caught between afternoon and evening, too cold to wander and too far from downtown to go home. The waitress in the place moved carefully to avoid the winter coats piled up on the backs of chairs.

"Well anyway, after I was hired things between us were always friendly. I'm sure he knew how I felt but it wasn't until the Christmas party that things started to happen between us."

"Wait that was when?" Greta was rummaging through her bag now, trying to find her buzzing pager.

"Late November. So I guess it's been a couple of months now - do you have to go?"

Greta was frowning at the page number - she didn't recognize it. Could someone page you long distance? And who had her pager number except her colleagues at work? "No I - I'm not on call. This is probably a mistake." Still, she pulled out a pen and scribbled the number down on her cocktail napkin for future inspection.

"'This is probably a mistake' - I think that's what I said the first time we got together," Babs smiled faintly. "So how do I correct it?"

Greta shrugged and drained her glass.

Somewhere else in the city, Lucy ate her fried egg with some freezer burnt wonder bread, Jason the metal head did a line of coke off his dirty living room coffee table, the lawyer Babs was fucking took out the garbage, and the garbage Greta had neglected to take out began to stink up her apartment.

Elsewhere in the city, a tall lean man with long dark hair was wondering where his favorite shirt went to, J.W. sighed and rolled over in his sleep, and from her desk in the emergency ward at Mt. Sinai, the nurse who had given Greta's pager number away to a complete stranger, could see that it was starting to snow.