On the Thursday evening Glenda Rowe went to do her shopping at the Prospect Vale shopping centre, which is the centre where she had worked for seventeen years and where she had not worked since January, and she went at the hour when the shutters come down, an hour she could have avoided and did not avoid.

At nine she heard hers, from the car park, while she was putting the bags in the back.

The sound of a roller door is a sound anyone would recognise as the sound of a roller door, but the chain on that one, which had been replaced in two thousand and twenty-one and never adjusted since, makes one extra catch a third of the way through its travel, a small stumble, and that catch was recognisable only to someone who had raised it and lowered it every day for five years.

She stood with her hand on the tailgate.

It was not nostalgia. It was that she knew, from hearing it, what height it had got to.

The decision had been delivered to her in a window envelope, twelve pages, which Glenda had read the first time standing up in the kitchen, the second time sitting down; and it was on the second reading that she stopped at the point where the commissioner wrote that the dismissal was harsh, disproportionate to the conduct, that the conduct did not constitute a valid reason, that reinstatement was ordered, that back pay was awarded in the measure of fifty per cent; and in twelve pages, gone over again and again afterwards in search of that very line, there was not one that said she had done the right thing.

It said she did not deserve to be dismissed. That is another matter.

Then there was, in the middle pages, the list: sixteen incidents between June of two thousand and twenty-five and January of two thousand and twenty-six, each one with the date, the time, the estimated value taken. That list she had no need to read (she had been there fourteen times out of sixteen; the two she had missed were her aunt's funeral and the day of the tooth, and the girl left on her own the second time had since changed jobs), and yet she read it all the same, line by line, because seeing your own evenings set down in a column by somebody else is a thing you do once only.

In all twelve pages the shutter was called "the roller door".

On the Thursday, at five past nine, while she was still leaning against the tailgate, the telephone rang: it was the company's number, the voice was cordial, it called her by her first name, and it read her an offer: pending the outcome of the appeal, an equivalent position at the Kings Meadows store, twenty-two kilometres, same classification, same level, with fuel reimbursement for the first three months.

And while the voice was reading, Danielle came out of the staff entrance.

Then Glenda did the thing she had not done in seven months, which is to say she crossed the car park diagonally, going between the two rows of cars instead of round them, with the telephone still live in her hand while the cordial voice went on reading out the conditions of the transfer inside her closed palm; she stopped two paces from Danielle, who was opening her car door, in order to say to her the sentence she had not said in the hearing, which she had not said because in the hearing they had asked her whether the act was reasonable while nobody had asked her why she had done it: which is that she had not brought the door down to shut those three in, not to stop them, not to hold them, but because in that moment she had thought one thing only, that with the door down nobody would get out into the street where at ten past six the school children go past; and that she had been wrong, not about having to bring it down, but about where the bottle would end up.

Danielle kept her hand on the car door.

"Seven months," she said.

"Yes."

Danielle did not say that it was all right, and Glenda realised afterwards that that had been the exact thing, because if she had said it was all right she would have closed a matter that was not closed and would have closed it out of kindness, which is the worst way; she said instead, looking at the roof of the car rather than at her, that on Monday she was on the morning shift, from half past eight, and that on morning shifts she usually took register two because register one gets the sun.

Then she got in and shut the door and indicated before pulling out of the car park, which is a thing nobody does in an empty car park.

Glenda stayed standing with the telephone in her hand.

At the other end the cordial voice had finished reading and was asking whether she had any questions about the arrangements.

She said she was not accepting the transfer. She said that on Monday she would present herself at Prospect Vale, at eight forty as per her contract, and that she would bring the copy of the decision, not because it was needed (she had already been told it was on file) but because she wanted to have it in her bag.

The voice said it would pass the communication on.

On Monday at eight forty the key goes into the lock at the bottom right, the one that has to be pushed in a little before it will turn. The counterweight releases. The chain runs in its channel. The roller door goes up, and it takes four seconds.