Just as her phone began to vibrate on the nightstand, Sophie had drifted into a light sleep. The blue light from the screen was blinding; squinting, she saw a new message pop up in the work group chat from Tom at the London office.
“Sorry to bother everyone. Regarding the Q3 data report, the color scheme for the chart on page four needs to be adjusted. Could you update it by 9:00 a.m. tomorrow?”
She stared at those words for a long time. Outside the window lay Manhattan’s never-sleeping skyline; a few windows were still lit, like stars scattered across the night sky. She had shut down her computer just three hours ago; the takeout box on the coffee table was still there, the chopsticks resting on the rim of the bowl, the grease already congealed.
Her finger hovered over the screen as she typed a few words and then deleted them.
The group chat was silent. Marianne in San Francisco had probably just gotten off work; Tanaka in Tokyo was on his lunch break; and the team in Shanghai had long since gone to sleep. Workers in every time zone were in the middle of their own late nights, jolted awake by the same message.
In the end, she simply replied, “Got it.”
Putting down her phone, Sophie didn’t immediately get up to turn on her computer. She rolled over and heard the sound of a child coughing in the middle of the night from next door—one cough after another—followed by the soft humming of a young mother lulling her child to sleep, intermittent like a weary little stream. She knew it was the woman living upstairs, around thirty years old, who worked at a kindergarten during the day and took care of her four-year-old daughter alone at night.
The work group chat lit up again.
“No need to bother. I’ll get up early tomorrow and make the changes myself. You should get some rest,” Tom replied immediately.
Sophie froze. Another message popped up: “Sorry, I just realized it’s 1 a.m. in New York right now. It’s only 6 a.m. here—I wasn’t thinking straight and didn’t check the time.”
She suddenly recalled that late night last month when she’d sent a similar message to a colleague in Beijing, completely forgetting that it was 3 a.m. there. At the time, the colleague had simply replied, “Got it,” but the report submitted the next day was a bit more sloppy than usual.
Sophie slowly sat up, typed out a long message, then deleted it all. In the end, she sent just four words: “It’s okay. Good night.”
Outside the window, a night flight glided silently by, its red lights flashing like a migrating bird. Sophie lay back down and heard the coughing from upstairs gradually subside.
She turned off her phone, and darkness washed over her once more. Some messages don’t need to be replied to in the middle of the night; some people don’t need to be awake at the same time. She thought about remembering to bring the mother and daughter upstairs a cup of soy milk from the breakfast shop tomorrow, then closed her eyes.
The work chat group ended with that “Good night,” like a tiny period. And the night in this city was still long—long enough for every weary soul to have a complete dream of their own.
