Chapter 8: Fourteen Months

The studio took up the fourth and fifth floors of a glass building near a subway exit.

My desk was by the window, exactly as Dojin had promised.

Someone had left a sticky note on the monitor in careful English.

"Welcome. The good printer is on 5."

By ten o'clock I had met the whole team.

There were seven of them, and they all stood up when I came through the door.

A woman with bright red glasses shook my hand with both of hers.

A shy engineer slid a bag of rice crackers across my desk and ran away.

Dojin leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, trying not to look proud.

"We are in the middle of a launch," he said. "You may be asked to read a lot of dialogue that was written by tired people."

"I read dialogue written by tired people for a living," I said.

The woman in red glasses laughed so hard she snorted.

The morning disappeared into spreadsheets and menus and the story text for a farming game, where one character would not stop proposing to a sheep.

I worked the way I always did.

My hands knew what to do even when the rest of me hadn't slept.

At noon the director stopped by my desk.

He was a quiet man in a gray cardigan.

"Dojin tells me you said no to us for six months," he said. "May I ask why?"

I thought about giving the polished answer, the one about timing and family.

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