At 3:40 every weekday he stood up from the forklift, planted both boots, and pushed his arms back until something around the T7 let go with a sound the loading crew could hear from the pallet racks. He was fifty-two, nineteen years on the same concrete floor. He called it his reset, and described the sound in detail, unprompted, to a temp who had been there four days.

Relief lasted maybe forty minutes, a figure he had never timed but knew exactly. His wife had booked physiotherapy for him twice; he moved the appointment, then moved it again, then let it lapse, because the stretch was free and it worked. The crack itself was under a second long. He had organized the whole afternoon, and most of the last nineteen years, around getting back to it.