Hana glanced over the desk partitions discreetly, and saw that Hosoda Chiho was still at her desk, working. She wondered how much more time would pass, before the two women went out on the job.
"So Hana-chan, are you looking forward to going to the field?" Mari asked in a whisper, smiling.
The young woman answered with a shy smile.
It wasn't that she was impatient, but rather that she was anxious.
She hadn't paid much attention to her colleagues working on the same floor, but she was aware that she hadn't seen Chiho until that very moment when she had been called by Chief Kobayashi. The two women had never crossed paths since she had joined the company, so how could she know that she was working in the same place, let alone on the same floor?
Hana had not suspected for a second that she would run into someone who had gone to high school with her again, in a totally different city.
