The lift in Tower Three of Suntec City did not announce its floors. It had done so once, in a pleasant female voice that said “Lobby” and “Thirty-Two” with equal conviction, but the speaker had been silenced sometime during a renovation three years ago, and no one had bothered to restore it. The numbers above the door still lit up in sequence, orange and reliable, but otherwise you rode in silence, which suited most people fine.

It was nine forty-seven on a Thursday in November.

Margaret Lim got in first, at the twenty-ninth floor.

She wore a navy blazer and heels that added three inches to a frame already tall for a Chinese Singaporean woman of nearly sixty. She was a senior partner at the law firm that occupied levels twenty-seven through thirty, and she had a board dinner at the Mandarin Oriental at ten-fifteen, and she was already calculating, with the particular arithmetic of senior executives, how late she could afford to be before it became a statement rather than a delay. Her phone was in her hand. She pressed “Lobby” and stood near the centre of the lift, watching the doors close.

The lift stopped at twenty-two.

The woman who got on was Filipino, thirty-five, and she had been in Singapore for eight years on a succession of employment passes. Her name was Agnes Reyes and she was the office administrator for a mid-sized accounting firm. She was carrying a bag of files because her boss had asked her, at six o’clock, to drop physical copies at a client’s office on the thirty-first floor by eight. She had done so. She had then gone back down to her own office to shut down properly and collect her things. She was not in a hurry. She had learned, across eight years, not to be in a hurry in ways that went unnoticed, because being in a hurry when unnoticed only wore you out.

She pressed “Lobby” and stood to one side. Margaret was already back on her phone.

At fifteen, the doors opened again.

The woman who stepped in had a trolley: a mop, a bucket, and the yellow wet-floor sign folded against the handle, and she wedged it into the corner with the efficiency of long practice. Her name was Rohani. She was fifty-two, Malay, from Tampines, and she had spent the past three hours cleaning the offices on levels fourteen through sixteen. She pressed “Lobby” and stood back.

Eighteen years she had worked in this building. She knew which toilets flooded when it rained, which pantry microwave smelled of fish on Fridays, which potted plants on level thirty-one had been slowly dying for two years because no one thought to water them on weekends. She knew this lift too, knew the slight hesitation it made between floors nine and eight, and knew the way the doors held a half-second longer than they should at lobby level. Her feet hurt by this hour. They always did.

The last woman got on at twelve.

She was still wearing her visitor’s pass clipped to her lanyard, which meant she had forgotten to return it at reception and would have to do so the next morning, which she would not remember until she was halfway to the MRT. Her name was Kavya; she was twenty-two, Tamil, and from a three-room flat in Bedok. She was doing a three-month internship at a management consultancy and had stayed until nearly ten because she had been afraid to leave before her supervisor did, and then her supervisor had left at six-thirty for a client dinner, and she had stayed anyway, finishing the slide deck she had been asked to finish by Friday, which was not for another day and a half. She had her laptop bag on one shoulder and a reusable coffee cup she had bought because she thought people here used them. She pressed “Lobby” and stood near the centre of the lift, equidistant from the other women by instinct, and looked at her phone.

The doors closed. The lift descended two floors, then stopped.

At first no one said anything. The numbers had read 10 and now read nothing. The hum of the motor had gone quiet. The orange numbers sat dark.

Margaret was already pressing Lobby again, then Door Open, then the intercom button, in a sequence that suggested she believed repetition would solve the problem. The intercom crackled and then gave nothing back.

“The alarm,” Rohani said.

Margaret looked at her.

“The red button. Press it and hold.”

Margaret pressed it. A faint bell sounded somewhere far below them. Rohani had heard it before. She knew from experience that the building management office was on the mezzanine, that at this hour it would be staffed by one security officer who was almost certainly watching something on his phone, that it would take him a few minutes to understand what the alarm meant and a few more to call the lift maintenance company, that the maintenance company’s after-hours line would route to a call centre somewhere that was not Singapore, and that the total wait time would be between forty minutes and an hour. She did not say any of this. She moved her trolley slightly so it was not in anyone’s way.

“Hello?” Margaret said into the intercom. “Hello? We’re stuck in the lift. Tower Three, we were between ten and twelve.” A pause. “Hello?”

“They’ll come,” Agnes said.

“When?”

Agnes didn’t answer. Kavya was looking at her phone. No signal, or barely any. She pressed the call button out of reflex, and it didn’t connect. She put the phone in her pocket and looked at the ceiling.

“Is there air?” she asked.

“Yes,” Rohani said. “There’s ventilation. We’re fine.”

She was not panicking, which was itself calming. Kavya breathed slowly, deliberately. Margaret had put her phone away and was now standing with her arms crossed, one heel slightly raised, which was how she stood when waiting for a taxi in the rain.

“I have a board dinner,” she said. Not to anyone. To the lift, perhaps.

“Call them,” Agnes said. “Your phone should work if you try a few times.”

“I know how my phone works.”

Agnes looked at the floor numbers. Still dark. “I’m just saying.”

It was Agnes who thought of the biscuits. She reached into her file bag and produced a sleeve of Khong Guan, the ones with the purple wrapper, and held them out to the centre of the lift. Rohani took one without ceremony. Kavya took one and said thank you. Margaret looked at the sleeve for a moment as though considering whether this was the kind of thing she did, and then took one.

They ate their biscuits. The lift was not cold, which was unusual. Most lifts in CBD buildings were kept at the same punishing temperature as the offices above. This one felt warmer, which was either a malfunction or mercy.

“Eighteen years,” Kavya said. She was looking at Rohani. “In this building?”

Rohani looked at her. “How do you know?”

“I heard you tell…someone. On the phone. Before you got on.”

Rohani nodded. “My manager. He was asking if I had finished the west wing. I hadn’t.”

“Did you finish it?”

“No. Then the lift stopped.”

Kavya almost smiled. “Right.” She shifted the laptop bag on her shoulder. “I’ve been here three weeks.”

“Internship?”

“Yes.”

Rohani had seen many interns. She saw them arrive in their first week carrying everything: lanyards, enthusiasm, and reusable cups, and she saw them in their last week carrying a cardboard box. Some came back as full-time staff. Some didn’t. She had no way to tell which would be which, but she had noticed that the ones who said thank you when she mopped past their desks at night were not necessarily the ones who stayed. She did not know what to make of this.

“Which firm?” Margaret asked Kavya.

“Meridian Consulting. Twenty-second floor.”

Margaret made a sound that was not quite recognition. “I know someone there. Linus Tan.”

“He’s my supervisor’s boss’s boss,” Kavya said. “I’ve never spoken to him.”

Margaret nodded. This did not seem to strike her as unusual.

“They make you stay late?” Agnes asked Kavya. It was a genuine question, not a leading one.

“I stayed on my own. I didn’t want to…” Kavya stopped. “I had work to finish.”

“That’s how it starts,” Agnes said without particular judgement.

“Is it bad?”

“Not bad. Just…it’s how it starts.” Agnes’s face was pleasant and not especially revealing. “You finish the deck. Next week you finish it faster. Then you stay later because you finish faster. Then you can’t remember when you didn’t stay late.” She smoothed the front of her skirt. “This is not advice. Just an observation.”

Margaret said nothing. She was looking at the intercom button, deciding whether to press it again.

“My mother was a cleaner,” Kavya said, to no one in particular.

The lift was quiet. Rohani waited.

“In a hotel. Not here, in Chennai. Before we moved.” Kavya’s voice was careful. “She worked nights.”

Rohani nodded slowly. She thought of her own children: her daughter who was studying nursing and her son who drove for Grab and was saving to take a business certificate course, and she thought of the various ways a life moved and the various ways it didn’t, and she thought of the pantry on level nineteen where she found, sometimes, food left in containers with sticky notes that said, “Please help yourself,” and food left in containers with no note at all, and the difference between them.

“Is she still…” Rohani began.

“She teaches now. Tuition. Tamil.” Kavya glanced up. “She’s very proud. That I’m here.”

“She should be,” Rohani said.

Margaret’s phone connected on the third try. She turned slightly away from the others and spoke in a low, even voice, the kind that conveys inconvenience without alarm, and arranged for her absence to be noted and apologised for and compensated by a specific bottle of wine she knew would be appropriate. When she hung up, she put her phone away and turned back, and the three other women looked at her, and she looked at them, and there was nothing to do but exist together in the remaining space.

“My daughter is a cleaner,” she said, which was not what she had meant to say.

Everyone waited.

“She doesn’t…she runs a cleaning company. Residential. She set it up herself.” A pause that seemed to cost her something. “I didn’t think it was a good idea at the time. I thought she should go into banking, law, something…” She stopped. “She has twelve employees now. She’s doing well.”

“Did you tell her that?” Agnes asked.

Margaret looked at Agnes as though this were a strange question, which it might have been, but Agnes’s expression was straightforward and without edge, and so Margaret said, “Not in so many words.”

The intercom crackled. A voice said there would be a technician in approximately thirty minutes; they were sorry for the inconvenience. Was anyone unwell?

“No,” Margaret said into it. “We’re fine.”

The technician arrived in twenty-six minutes. When the doors opened, gradually, then all at once, the lobby light came at them with the flatness of a place that had been waiting without knowing it was waiting. A security guard stood there with a clipboard. There was the smell of floor wax and recycled air and, somewhere, faintly, coffee from a vending machine near the turnstiles.

They stepped out in the order they were closest to the door: Agnes first, then Kavya, then Rohani with her trolley, then Margaret. The security guard asked if everyone was all right, went through his checklist, and apologised in the specific way of people reading from a script.

Agnes thanked the technician. Kavya was already half-searching for her EZ-link card. Rohani manoeuvred her trolley towards the service corridor.

Margaret stood for a moment in the lobby. The lift behind her sat open and empty, its interior suddenly looking smaller than she remembered, or perhaps the same size, and she was simply outside it now.

“Rohani,” she said.

The cleaner stopped.

Margaret opened her mouth and closed it. Something had prepared itself to be said and then thought better of the journey. “Good night,” she said instead.

Rohani looked at her. Eighteen years she had worked in this building. She knew which things were worth waiting for and which were not.

“Good night,” she said, and pushed her trolley through the door.

Outside, it was raining. Kavya ran for the covered walkway. Agnes put up her umbrella and walked with the calm of someone accustomed to rain, to waiting, to arriving at places after everyone else had already decided what to think.

On the other side of the lobby doors, the lift closed again. The orange numbers blinked on, then rose slowly back into the building. Fifteen. Twenty-two. Twenty-nine.

The only substantive change beyond the logistics is that final line…the numbers now count back up through their floors specifically, which felt right given the correction.