Mia’s back was aching as she straightened. The mahogany desk had been unwieldy and heavy, thick set drawers sliding in unruly ways as she half pulled, half dragged it through the hallway. It now sat, scratched and fading, by her garden gate. Its legs were scuffed stark white, like scratch marks revealing bone, where she had had to drag it across the pavement. Its top was blotched with rings where cups of coffee had once sat, its dusty drawers now devoid of the scribblings and manuscripts that had once filled them.

And Mia stood there, rolling her shoulders and looking down on the desk. Once, she had sat, with nothing but the desk and golden, pooling lamp light for company, fervently crafting worlds with her words. She had spent countless nights chasing dreams, lost in fantastical lands or maniacal minds, trying to capture the essence of them through the incessant scratchings of pen on paper.

But over time the desk became covered with old council bills and crunching receipts. Where pen and paper once resided, there was now a laptop and a spreadsheet. Several spreadsheets, in fact, with inches upon inches of crawling numbers, each jumping and shifting with every new entry.

And now the desk was, in fact, cluttering the room, as it perhaps always had been, only she’d never noticed. Steve had his office set up, which she could use when she needed to, and frankly, there was no need for a glorified paper cabinet that filled up the already crammed rooms.

Her gaze lifted, a hand idly drifting over her stomach. Up ahead on the street, a delivery truck was slowly ambling.

The cot would be on its way soon.