The city looks different from five in the morning. Arden had worked nights for eleven years and was never fully accustomed to it — the mild shock, at the end of each shift, of stepping into a world just beginning its day while she was trying to conclude hers. Other people's urgency, so recently incomprehensible, was now comprehensible but no longer relevant. The morning rush was not her rush. It was happening in a time zone she did not currently occupy.
Her route home passed the produce market, already in full operation — the stalls setting up, the delivery trucks double-parked, the high-decibel negotiation that accompanied the arrival of perishable goods. She had learned, in eleven years, to find this comforting. The market was indifferent to what time most people considered it to be. The market had its own time.
She made tea and took it to the window, because this was the ritual and the ritual mattered. Below, the street was acquiring its daytime self: shopkeepers arriving, delivery bikes threading through the early traffic, a woman walking a dog with focused determination. Arden watched with the appreciation of someone who had spent the night ensuring that the machinery of the ordinary continues to function.
She did not resent the people who used the city in its conventional way — during daylight, while it was lit and loud. They were entitled to their version. But she had, over eleven years, developed a feeling for the city that they did not have access to: the city at three in the morning, when its essential structure was visible the way bones appear in an X-ray, stripped of the flesh of commerce and convenience.
She knew which streets went quiet first and which never did. She knew the particular quality of silence outside a hospital at four in the morning, which is not silence but a held breath. These were things you could not know without being there, and most people were never there.
She finished her tea. She drew the curtains. Outside, the morning was beginning without her, which was fine. The morning could manage without her. She had done her part.
She was asleep in twenty minutes.