Status Updates From Miss Benson's Beetle

She'd made plans. But suddenly she'd stopped. Or, rather, life had. Life had stopped. And even though she occasionally found her eye caught by something that, at a distance, looked like a piece of gold and turned out to be trash, she had abandoned all hope of getting to New Caledonia. So this time she would do it.

[…] she would plod up the stairs to the fourth floor. She would make a meal with whatever she could find, she would wash up and put things away, then later take an aspirin and read herself to sleep, and no one would know. That was the truth—she could skip a few chapters, or eat everything in her flat in one sitting—and not only would no one notice, but it would make no difference to the world if they did.