She's okay as long as she's busy. Unfortunately the clerical work she's doing at the hospital is so straightforward it doesn't tax her intellect in the slightest. Her lunch hour has come and gone and she's already finished her day's work. She sighs and looks out of the window into the car park. Heat shimmers off the tarmac. It's hard to believe that, right at this very moment, the Grid coexists with this place. She closes her eyes and tries to imagine what it felt like to sit there under the fluorescent lighting, hearing the whirr of the Thames House machinery. It doesn't work - the sunlight is so bright it glows through her eyelids.
She gets up from her chair to buy a bottle of water from the waiting area vending machine.
As she stands in the cool lobby the automatic doors slide open and a wave of heat rolls through. Enticed through the doors she finds a white plastic chair sitting invitingly by the entrance and sits down into it with a sigh. Even now, after a few months, she's still taken aback by the heat when she steps through the doors to walk home. It's still uncanny that it's warmer outside than in.
She doesn't look for him anymore though. There was a time when she saw him everywhere. When she first started working here, and the doors whirred open to let her out into the evening, she still half expected to see him on the other side of the road. He would be wearing a white shirt with the cuffs rolled back and his hands in his pockets. Perhaps a jacket over one shoulder? Strange that he never wore sunglasses - perhaps they were too obviously Spook. She sipped the cool water and allowed herself the luxury of thinking of him. She imagined their eyes meeting and the breeze ruffling his collar slightly as they stood immobilized with that wonder at eachother.
She closes her eyes again and he's back there across the road, and she's walking towards him. When she reaches the kerb he says her name - "Ruth" - and she knows that he is home for her. He is everything that she is homesick for. But then a van passes between them and when it's gone, so is he.
Was she even remembering his face accurately anymore? When she had scanned the Birthday Honours List in an old British newspaper and seen it - Pearce, Henry KBE - for Services to Security - her heart had leapt right up in her chest. She had imagined him then, on one knee in front of the Queen and she missed him so much that it felt like grief. It felt like jealousy and pain and love.
She couldn't bring herself to quit these thoughts of him. "Let me go" she had said, but found she couldn't do the same. Absence had only made the heart grow fonder. Sooner or later there was going to have to be an intervention, she knew. One night she was going to have to say "Enough!". Maybe she'd finally soften towards the advances of the young Doctor who always seemed to be watching her.
But not yet.