"It's a mistake to get too attached to any of the animals?" he asked.

"A mistake is right." Maeve sighed. "I'd a pet pig for a while. Poor Winifred. They took her away to make rashers of her. I won't make that mistake again. Now I've a drake and at least the only thing he'll die of is natural causes."

"A drake?" Matt asked.

"A male duck."

"I knew that." At least, now that she'd said it, he did.

She laughed at his bluster. "Oh! You're such a blagger."

The three other team members stiffened slightly. Easy-going as he was, Matt was still their boss. Was it okay to call him a blagger? But Maeve's laughter was full of affection for Matt and Matt certainly didn't seem offended. He and Maeve were twinkling and smiling at each other. In fact, they twinkled and smiled at each other a lot . . .

"Here, I've a photo of him in my wallet," Maeve said. "Roger. He's a beauty."

"A photo of a duck?" Matt didn't know what to make of this; he thought it was very odd but also very funny. "This gets better and better. And he's called Roger? Like, why Roger?"

"He looks like a Roger. No, he really does. I'll show you." Maeve pulled her wallet from her satchel, looking for the photo. But, in her enthusiasm, she accidentally opened her purse and, with an ominous flash of metal, a waterfall of change roared toward the floor of the Dart, coins cracking and bouncing and rolling the full length of the carriage.

All the other passengers tried to pretend that nothing had happened. Those that were hit on the foot by a coin kicked it away or flicked a quick look down just to check that it wasn't a mouse chewing their shoe, then returned to their texting or their magazine or their grumpy introspection.

"Oh cripes!" Maeve stood up and laughed helplessly. "There goes my change for the laundrette." As if she had a magnetic draw, all thirteen passengers raised their heads, and suddenly Matt saw the power she possessed. Not a swaggery, arrogant power, not the power granted by expensive clothes or glossy makeup-because Maeve's jeans and Uggs and tangled curls would hardly have bouncers in nightclubs rushing to remove the red rope and usher her forward. What made Maeve so potent was that she expected the best from other people.

She never considered that the strangers around her wouldn't want to help-and her faith was repaid. Matt watched, transfixed, as nearly everyone in the carriage dropped automatically to their knees, as if they were in the presence of an awe-inspiring deity, scrambling for any coins that they could see. Matt and the others were in there, helping, but so were Lithuanian naturopaths and Syrian kitchen porters and Filipino nurses and Irish schoolboys. They were all on the floor, gathering and walking in a low crouch, like slow-motion Cossacks. "Thank you," Maeve said, over and over, receiving the returned coins. "Thank you, oh thank you, you're so decent, more power to you, fair play, outstanding, God bless, thanks."

This is the person I want to be with, Matt found himself thinking. Then he revised it. No, he thought, this is the person I want to be.

Two stops later, when Matt and his team got off, Maeve called out, "Thanks again, you were very decent," and you could have roasted potatoes in the warmth that she left in her slipstream. Matt knew that everyone would go home that evening and relate the story. "A two-euro coin hit me on the foot and I thought, feck it, missus, you dropped the money, you get to pick it up, I mean, I've had a hard week, but she seemed like a nice person so I did help to pick up the money, and you know what, I'm happy that I did, I feel good about myself-"

My trip down Matt and Maeve's memory lane is interrupted by sudden activity from two floors above and I scoot up to check it out.

Day 61 . . .

Andrei and Jan had put their textbooks away neatly and were emerging into the hall, casting fearful looks for Lydia. I was still finding it hard to tell them apart-they existed in such a fug of Lydia-fear that their vibrations were quite corrupted. I noted this much: Andrei had astonishing blue eyes which burned with the intensity of a religious zealot's, but he was not a religious zealot. Jan also had blue eyes, but his did not burn with the intensity of a religious zealot's. However . . . yes, however . . . he had a prayer book which he read frequently with some-yes!-zeal.

So true what they say: one really cannot judge on appearances.

They equipped themselves with beer and Pringles and took their seats in the living room for Entourage. They were mad for Entourage. It was their favorite show, one of the high points of their week. They longed to go to America and live an Entourage life, with sunshine and cars and, of course, beautiful women, but, above all else, the unbreachable walls of male solidarity.

Silent and worshipful before the television, they didn't hear Lydia enter the room. They only knew she was there when she broke the Entourage spell by saying, "Boys, boys, why so glum?"

"What is glum?" Jan asked anxiously. Instantly, he was sorry he had spoken. Andrei's constant advice was: Do not engage with her.

"What is glum?" Lydia considered. "Glum is unhappy, sad, downcast, low, gloomy, of little cheer." She gazed at them with an expression that was intended to seem fond. "Homesick, that's what Dr. Lydia has diagnosed." In a voice dripping with insincere sympathy she asked gently, "My little dumplings, are you missing Minsk?"

Neither boy spoke. Over the past three miserable weeks, they had become familiar with this routine in which Lydia threw about city names ending in "sk."

"Minnnssskkkk!" Lydia savored the sound. "Sssskkk? Missing it?"

When she got no response, she said in fake surprise, "Not missing it? But how unpatriotic you are."

This was too much for Jan, who, every waking moment he was in Ireland, yearned with desperate passion to be back home. "Irishgirl, we are not from Minsk! We are from Gdansk! Poles, not Belarussians!"

As soon as the words were uttered, Jan wanted to cut out his tongue. Lydia had broken him! Once again he had betrayed the resistance!

Deeply ashamed, he looked at Andrei. I'm sorry. I'm not as strong as you.

It's okay, Andrei replied silently. You must not blame yourself. She could destroy even the bravest man.

(Okay, their separate identities are coming into focus for me now. Andrei-older, smarter, stronger. Jan-younger, sweeter, dafter.) Lydia left, and after a lengthy silence Jan admitted, "I am glum."

Several seconds elapsed before Andrei spoke. "I too am glum."

Day 61 . . .

Back on the ground floor, it seemed that Matt and Maeve were planning to pop out for a late-night jog. In their bedroom-an Ikean wonderland, the bedside cabinets slightly off-kilter because the assembly instructions in the boxes had been in Czech and Matt said that if he had to go back to Ikea to get the English ones, he'd drive himself at high speed into a wall-they undressed, Maeve turning away from Matt as she removed her bra. Immediately, they proceeded to get dressed again, seeming to put on even more clothes than they had already been wearing. Maeve was now covered neck to ankle in gray sweats and Matt was kitted out in jocks, baggy jogging pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt. Then . . . bafflingly! . . . they got into bed! Why so swaddled? It was a warm night out there.

It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps they were about to play a sexy undressing game. But what was wrong with removing the clothes they'd already been wearing?

I was far from happy at the thought of witnessing whatever strange jiggery-pokery they were about to unleash but I forced myself to linger. I had no choice! It was important to get the lay of the land. Propped up on his pillow, Matt flicked his way through a car magazine, snapping the pages, hungry to see what the next contained, meanwhile on her side of the bed, Maeve read Pride and Prejudice . . . and that's all that happened. I lingered some more, noting the hefty little pile of other Jane Austens on Maeve's nightstand-clearly a fan. And I lingered still more, until it became clear that no sexy undressing game was about to kick off.

I must admit to a little relief.

The only problem with Matt falling in love with Maeve four and a quarter years ago was that Matt already had a girlfriend . . .

Yes, the lovely Natalie. And she really was lovely. Of all the beautiful, brainy girls at Goliath-and there were more than two hundred youthful employees so there were many to choose from-Natalie was the most beautiful, the most brainy of all: smooth brown skin; long, lean thighs; a defiant question mark in her eye; a great facility for her job. (A Belgian national, she was a wonderful advertisement for her famously dull country.) Matt-smiling, lovable Matt, with the widely acknowledged conviction that he would Go Far-was a partner worthy of the lovely Natalie.

Matt and Nat each headed up a sales team and, lovers though they were, they were also rivals. They competed against each other, gloating (with great good humor, of course) every time they closed a sale of one of Goliath's software packages. "One less for you, bud."

So when Maeve joined as a trainee, it was no surprise that Matt, with his glossy girlfriend and his demanding job, barely noticed her. Mind you, Goliath being what it was (a company enjoying exponential growth), new people were appearing round the clock-on the same day that Maeve had started, so had Tarik from Pakistan and Yen-way from Taiwan-so there were always fresh faces enjoying a brainstorming game of ping-pong in the chill room or queueing to partake of the free breakfast granola. It was hard to keep up.

Maeve, friendly and positive, with a musical, rounded accent, was popular among her colleagues, but she still hadn't registered as a meaningful presence on Matt's radar until one night when Matt and Nat were leaving work. They clicked quickly down the shiny marble hallway, black leather footwear flashing, serious tailoring flying, the storm troopers of Sales. Moving in harmony, they powered through Goliath's massive double doors-taking a door each-passing Maeve who was crouched low, unlocking her bike.

"Goodnight, lads," she said.

With perfect synchronicity, Matt and Nat swung their smooth, perfectly shaped heads to see who had spoken and-as one-exploded into uncontrollable laughter.

"What?" Maeve asked. Realization dawned and a smile spread across her face. "Is it my hat?"

"Yes!"

Maeve's hat was an orange and pink Inca-patterned knitted helmet. A triangle of yarn covered each ear, woolen plaits fell to her chest and the top came to a sharp point, on which an orange pompom was perched.

"Is it very bad?" Maeve was still smiling.

"Very bad," Nat said.

"But it's all the rage on the Machu Picchu trail and it keeps my ears warm." This made all three of them laugh even harder. Then, with a rough rush of metal, Maeve liberated her bike from its chain, hopped on to the saddle and, moving fluidly, freewheeled out into the traffic.

"She's so sweet." Nat sighed. "What do you think about her and David? Is it the real thing?"

Matt hadn't a clue. He'd barely noticed Maeve until five minutes ago, much less known that she was going out with David.

"So much in common." Nat smiled fondly. "Seeing as they're both Galwegians."

(David was actually from Manchester-it wasn't necessary to come from Galway to qualify for Galwegian status. It was an umbrella term that implied fondness for falafels, frizzy sweaters and festivals-music, obviously, but comedy, poetry, beer . . . anything would do. If it involved mud and pints, it was perfect. If the festival could be combined with a protest march, then so much the better. Indeed, the ideal weekend, a veritable utopia for a Galwegian, was to get caught up in an antiglobalism riot, cracked on the skull with a truncheon and thrown into a police cell for twenty-four hours with a trio of hard-core protesters from Genoa. Galwegians were hardy; they slept like babies on their friends' cold hard floors. Galwegians were proud of being Irish-even when they weren't actually Irish-and they dropped many Irish words into conversation. Much of Goliath's multicultural staff spoke basic Galwegian. A popular phrase was "Egg choct egg oal?" It meant "Coming for a drink?') The funny thing was that at the time, Matt coveted David far more than he coveted Maeve.

"I'd love to get David on my team," he said wistfully.

"You and me both," Natalie replied.

David was on Godric's team and was Godric's most valuable asset. He was super-brainy, a mathematics whiz, and he could disentangle the knottiest implementation problems. He just kept plugging away, trying things this way, trying things that way, until he'd unlocked and ordered things into a way that worked.

"David could be a team leader himself if he wanted to," Matt said.

David was probably older than almost everyone else in Goliath, only by a few years, but enough to make him a natural leader. Nevertheless, he resisted all attempts to be steered in the direction of management.

"What do you think the story is?" Matt asked Nat.

"Doesn't want to be pigeon-holed, he said."

David had packed an awful lot already into his thirty years. He'd traveled all over and done an impressive variety of jobs from teaching physics in Guyana to being a nanny for three children in a progressive-thinking family in Vancouver.

"Doesn't want a "career path," he told me." Nat shook her head and laughed. She couldn't understand people who didn't have the same ambition that she did.

"Very noble of him."

"Maybe he's a little too noble?"

"Mmmm."

They were both remembering the incident the previous week when David-always passionate about injustice-became so enraged by pro-Russian coverage of the ongoing war in Chechnya that he printed out the offending article from the Reuters site and gathered several acolytes around his desk while he ceremoniously burned the page. It had set off all the smoke alarms.

"And lucky the sprinklers didn't start," Matt said.

"He could have destroyed all our machines," Nat said.

"And he didn't care. Said the principle was more important."

"Principle." Nat rolled her eyes. "For God's sake."

After the laughing-at-the-hat incident, Matt knew who Maeve was and a week or so later, when he was driving to work and saw an orange pompom bobbing above the traffic, he was able to say to himself: It's that Maeve girl, the one with the hat.

On her bike, she wove in and out of lanes until she disappeared from view, then the lights changed and Matt took off and caught up with her. While he was once again stalled in a sea of cars, she was diligently working her way away from him and into the distance, then the lights changed and he lurched forward, closing the gap. It became a pattern. She'd get ahead of him, he'd chase after her, searching for the jaunty orange pompom, then she'd put some distance between them while he clenched his hands on the steering wheel, waiting for the chance to move.

Although she knew nothing about it, he felt they were in a race. His journey to work had never been more fun.

As he approached the busy intersection of Hanlon's Corner he was in the lead. The lights were green, but anxiety that he'd get too far ahead of Maeve made him slow down and the lights obliged by changing to yellow. Just as the lights turned red, Maeve whizzed up the inside lane to the head of the traffic and stopped for the briefest moment while making a series of high-speed calculations. Matt could actually feel her judging her speed, the length of time available to her and the distance of the drivers who were gunning their engines, ready for their green light, now that the opposite lights had gone red. Then she shot out into the empty space, looking small and astonishingly brave, like a student squaring up to an army tank. All eyes were on the orange pompom as she raced through the danger zone, and when she reached the safety of the other side Matt was buoyed up with relief and admiration.

The episode made such an impression that when he got in to work he made a special visit to the crowded cube she shared with the other trainees.

"Morning, Miss Maeve. Has anyone ever told you you're an excellent breaker of red lights? So calm, so daring?"

She looked up from her screen, her eyes dancing with amusement. "Has anyone ever told you you're full of guff?"

"Guff?"

"You know, chat, blather, blarney."

"Right." Some Galwegian word, obviously. "I saw you on the way to work. Crossing Hanlon's Corner when the lights were against you. Nerves of steel."

"I believe in taking my chances."

"You're lucky you weren't killed."

"Fortune favors the bold."

"You wouldn't catch me cycling in this city."

"You should try it. It ennobles the soul."

"My soul is noble enough."

"Is it now?" she asked, looking at him, her expression amused.

"Stop it!"

"What?"

"Looking at me like you know something about me that I don't."

"Me?" She laughed. "I know nothing."

Matt didn't tell Natalie about the morning he'd raced Maeve to work. There was no need, it was no biggie. The funny thing was that Natalie was just as fond of Maeve as he was and together they'd claimed a sort of ownership of her the way you would an adorable, harmless puppy. At Friday-night drinks in the pub, they made sure they were sitting near her, listening to her melodic accent and the strange words she used. "Ganzey" when she meant sweater-that type of thing.

One Friday evening, Nat swung by Matt's desk. "You ready?"

"Ten minutes."

"See you in the pub. Make sure Maeve's there." And she was gone.

Matt knew better than to ask Nat to wait for him. Nat never wasted time.

When he'd finished, he made his way to Maeve's cube. "Coming for a drink?"

"A drink?" Maeve gazed at nothing as she considered. She seemed to disappear inside her head. After a short pause she smiled and said, "No, not tonight, Matt."

"Why not, Farmgirl?" He felt, well, he felt quite . . . rejected. "Off out with your boyfriend?"