He came on Wednesdays and she had started, without deciding to, leaving the terminal in row four uncalibrated.
It read as oversight. It was not oversight. By the time he arrived the sun was already gone, the way it went in January, swallowed by three o'clock, and the building emptied of the families who came to sit with the dead and left red-eyed and grateful. Then the amber rows hummed for no one but her, and then for him.
"Row four's drifting again," she said.
"Is it." He set his case down on the concrete. The scar through his eyebrow caught the light when he bent to it.
She knew things she had no right to. She knew his mother had loved a particular shade of green and a particular silence after rain. She had structured those memories herself, eleven weeks ago, had read *Reid* on the intake form and said nothing, and now stood three feet from the grief she had handled with gloved precision while he handled the machine that held it.
He worked. She watched him work. Forty minutes of it — the small screwdriver, the diagnostic chime, his hands moving the way hands move around things that break easily. The condenser units breathed their faint floral nothing into the cold air. She did not finish her coffee.
"Sela," he said. Not a question yet. The question still gathering.
He reached past her for the panel and his forearm grazed her shoulder, and neither of them moved away from it.
The hum went on. His breath, when it came, was unsteady, and hers matched it without meaning to.
She had rehearsed this so many times that the warmth of him felt like something already lost, and she had not even let him ask.
