Model opening (approx. 250 words), from Stimulus 1:

The cake had been there since the 9:40.

Ines knew because she had been on the 9:40, and she had seen the woman get off it: a small woman in a raincoat the color of mustard, holding the box out in front of her with both hands the way you might carry something alive. The woman had set it on the bench. She had pushed a single candle into the icing, slowly, as if the icing might object. Then she had stood there, looking up the road, while the bus pulled away and the rain came down harder and Ines watched her through the fogged back window until the corner took her.

Now it was 11:15, and Ines was walking home the long way, and the woman was gone, and the cake was not.

She stopped under the shelter. The streetlight above it was failing in a slow, deliberate rhythm, on and off, on and off, like someone trying to remember a word. In the light, the cake looked almost unbearably cheerful. Pink icing. Silver balls. Letters piped in a careful, slightly wobbling hand: HAPPY 40TH, DANNY.

Across the road, a single window was lit on the fourth floor.

Ines looked at the window. She looked at the cake. She looked at the torn timetable, where only two words were left, and understood, with the cold, specific certainty that sometimes arrives in the middle of the night, that somebody had waited here for a long time for a person who had not come.