House Rules
The only bright spot in all of this was Riley.
She had started at the company a few days after you, hired as a secretary, and like you she hadn't really clicked with anyone else in the office. The others had their established groups, their inside jokes, their Friday drinks traditions that nobody explicitly excluded you from but nobody explicitly invited you to either.
Riley seemed to navigate the same invisible perimeter.
You started talking the way new people do...small things at first, coffee machine conversations, complaints about the printer that never worked. Then longer ones. Then, on the days you weren't in the office, messages that filled the gaps.
She was funny. Warmer than she looked at first. Easy to talk to in a way that felt increasingly rare given the current state of your domestic life.
You looked forward to Mondays and Thursdays more than you had ever looked forward to anything work-related in your life.
It was pretty clear you had developed a crush basically at first sight. Though to be fair, given your current state of frustration, if Riley hadn't come along you'd probably have developed feelings for the same printer.