In the grand scheme of things, Tessa Wright considered herself a relatively uncrazy person. She was Prozac- and Xanax-free and required only the occasional tune-up from her therapist. Yet she sensed vultures circling outside her office door. She said as much to her friend and fellow banker, Kate.

"That's paranoia talking," replied Kate, no mincer of words. Tessa supposed her unrest might be chemically induced, rising with the glue fumes from her new carpeting. More likely, though, it was a spot-on assessment of her prospects for continued employment.

"Be logical," Kate said as she lounged in the one guest chair that fit in Tessa's small space. "We're both members of the streamlining team. They wouldn't have asked us to join the group if they plan to terminate us. This place has always been about teamwork, and no one's done it better than us."

True, to a point. They had met at Midwest National Bank as fledgling credit analysts seventeen years earlier. To Tessa, that first heart-pounding, new-suit, hopes- abounding day seemed in some ways recent and in others ancient history. She and Kate had been anomalies, staying on instead of job-hopping in Detroit's volatile financial services industry. In those years together, they had formed an alliance. Kate was the balls-out tough member of the team, and Tessa was the charm and diplomacy department.

Ultimately they'd been rewarded, too — though Kate more so. She was a first vice president in charge of the asset- based lending group, and since that promotion, also Tessa's boss. For friendship's sake, Tessa had managed to swallow her jealousy with only the occasional hiccup.

"Teamwork? Absolutely," she said. "Teamwork's key, right up until the moment you're summoned upstairs and terminated. We all die alone."

"Relax, Tessa. Morbid doesn't suit you," Kate replied. Tessa knew it didn't, but the events of the past several weeks — the former coworkers departing with their boxes of personal effects, the falsely jocular farewell parties where too much was drunk and too much said — had taken their toll. She'd developed a taste for gallows humor and an alarming fondness for the acid bitterness that had begun to leach into her heart.

"I think I'm wearing morbid rather well."

Kate's smile was tinged with the sense of impending doom they all carried these days. "You're wearing it as well as any of us are wearing our armor."

Which wasn't saying much. Kate was edgier than usual, and Tessa nearly out of ways to smooth the turbulent atmosphere. Still, they would survive. She and Kate had weathered changes in management, changes in economy, fashion crises, men crises and some all-around botching-up of their lives. And as essentially different as they were, they'd stuck it out together.

Kate stood. "I need a cigarette and you need to clear out of here for a few minutes. Come on, let's go walk the fitness trail."

The heavily treed path winding through the headquarters' suburban campus was most often used by smokers seeking sanctuary from smoke-free laws. Kate, a chain-smoker, was now incredibly and ironically fit. Tessa, who had never smoked, could hardly keep up. In this instance, she preferred to blame her penchant for high heels rather than her avoidance of exercise in any form. Still, it was a balmy — by Michigan standards — seventy-degree, mid- October day. She would walk and pretend to enjoy it.

They were nearly to the elevators when Kate's secretary stopped them. "Kate, Simon Pearson wants to see you in his office."

Pearson, the corporate angel of death. Since the firings had begun, silence and averted gazes had become his harbingers in the hallways. A mention of his name killed conversation. To be summoned meant career annihilation.

Tessa's reaction to Kate's summons wasn't her finest moment. She briefly closed her eyes and tried to quell her mental celebration, but it was a losing battle. She sent one selfish and heartfelt thought out into the universe: Thank God the vultures weren't mine.

When she again focused on Kate, her friend had lost much of the color beneath her fading tan. Tessa was sure that even gutsy Kate sometimes bolted awake at four in the morning, cold with panic because her job could be going away. In Tessa's experience, exhaustion and the human mind's resilience were generally enough to lull one past those moments — but when faced with the reality...?

"Shit," Kate said.

Kate's secretary had already moved two steps back, as though retreating from the creeping grasp of failure. "I'll, uh, just..."

"Go on," Kate told her, calmer now. "You might as well start finding me a couple of boxes for my things."

Tessa scrambled for poise, folding her hands together. She was startled to find them shaking, but shouldn't have been, considering the metallic taste of fear heavy in her mouth.

"Do you want me to come up there and wait for you?" The offer had been impetuous and, she suddenly realized, impolitic.

Kate shook her head and punched the elevator's up button. "No. As you said, we all die alone."

After Kate had stepped into the elevator, Tessa considered making a weak joke about Kate's trip to a better place, but found she didn't have the stomach for it. Gallows humor was losing its gloss.

She returned to her mini-office, pausing briefly outside her door to look at the charcoal-colored placard with her name imprinted in neat white letters. As her circumstances had changed, she had slid that particular bit of plastic — and before, one like it bearing her maiden name — in and out of any number of holders. She thought of Kate, soon to tuck her nameplate into a box and depart, and knew yet another unbecoming moment of relief. This was the first time she would willingly cede the role of trailblazer to Kate Murkowski.

Tessa sat, elbows braced on her desk, head bowed with thumbs pressed to her cheekbones and fingers following the arch of her widow's peak — her customary pose for corporate meditation. She had customers to call and, thanks to a dearth of credit analysts to handle grunt work, financial reporting to input into the bank's tracking system. Both could wait. So many tasks had fallen onto the wait list since she'd become aware that the bank wasn't staying its course.

Dinner with one of her husband Jack's customers? Not in the past eight months. She couldn't, and she'd be poor company, anyway.

Sneak away midafternoon for some rare "together time"? Impossible. She needed to be seen at her desk, just for appearances, if not to actually function.

For months now, she'd been awaiting her fate. In some small way Kate had been the lucky one today. Not that Tessa planned to share the sentiment with her.

Eyes closed, Tessa listened to the ebb and flow of conversation as people passed by her door to linger in front of Kate's. She didn't bother straining for the words, for most would be spoken with insincerity. Seeing the mighty tumble had a way of bringing quiet glee. As she well knew.

The unsentimental truth was that someone would have to replace Kate, though not at Kate's salary level, which Tessa knew was loftier than her own. It wasn't as though the bank could extract itself from the business of asset- based lending. Around industrial Detroit, machinery and equipment were the coin of the realm. They were a gritty form of collateral, and worth a fraction of their original purchase price when liquidated, but unavoidable.

It was wrong, almost like corpse-robbing, but already Tessa considered the comforts of Kate's full-size office. One with a window, two guest chairs and space for files. As the bank had begun to pare down, it had packed more employees into the headquarters building. In this process Tessa's office — and a number of others — had been subdivided. Kate had said not to take it personally; the facilities department had told her that it had been a matter of Tessa's location. And at least she had new carpet.

The quietly selfish voice that Tessa seldom let slip out had whispered that Kate was just next door. Why had she been immune? Now regret nipped at Tessa for both her prior and present selfishness.

"Napping again?"

Tessa looked up to see Kate in the doorway. She'd regained a measure of her color, though the set of her jaw remained tense.

"The deed's done," she said.

"And how was it?" Tessa asked, uncertain of what else one said to the newly terminated. Unlike some in the building, she'd shied away from the firing postmortems.

Kate shrugged. "Clinical. I have two days to wrap up matters and give final reports to Hank," she said, referring to her direct superior. "Really, it was painless."

Kate had never lied well, always giving herself away with a subtle roll of the shoulders, as though the fit of her clothing had grown too tight. This time was no different.

"I'm sorry," Tessa said. Those, at least, were the appropriate words.

"I'll be okay. It's no big deal."

Tessa noted the shifting of shoulders that marked yet another lie. She wanted to be able to fix this for Kate, to give some assurance that everything would indeed be okay, but that particular well had run dry.

Kate glanced over her shoulder at the small group clustered on the outer boundary of the cubicle maze behind her. "I really need that cigarette now. In fact, I need the hell out of here." She paused and shook her head, perhaps recalling that her wish had just been permanently granted.

"Why don't you head over to Dante's?" Tessa suggested.

"I'll meet you when I'm done here."

Dante's was a bistro not far from both Kate's and Tessa's homes. Over the years, it had become their official Friday evening cocktail/appetizer/gripe session location.

Kate nodded and was gone. Tessa rose and closed her office door. Better to be trapped in an airless closet, adrift on the buzz of glue fumes, than to witness the whispers, e- mails and gossip now rippling out from the epicenter of the latest firing.

After a few minutes, Kate's side of a phone conversation came through the wall to Tessa. She couldn't pick up the particulars, but the hostile tone was obvious, as was the hard ricochet of the receiver being slammed into its base. Following that was the louder slam of Kate's door. And thus a new era began.