She kept returning to locker 114 the way you return to a bruise — not to heal it, just to confirm it's still yours.
Her fingers found the handle again. Cool brushed metal, the faint hum of crystalline storage beneath it. She didn't open it. She never opened it. Around her the amber lockers held the dead of Rotterdam in neat dormancy, and the silence Deren's firm had engineered into this building pressed close, almost deliberate.
He stood a few lockers down, pretending to read a structural readout. He had been pretending for an hour.
"You should go home," she said. "It's late."
"So should you."
She turned and stopped. He had crossed the distance without sound — that was his trade, the absence of sound — and now stood near enough that she felt the warmth coming off him, the suggestion of contact she did not complete. His hand settled on the locker surface beside hers. A breath of space between their fingers. Neither of them closed it.
She wanted, suddenly and entirely, to be touched by someone who didn't already know what she carried.
"This one's difficult," she said, meaning the file. "I can't seem to close it."
He looked at the locker, not at her. "Sable Vreiss," he read off the intake tag. Her name. Her own handwriting, eighteen months old, from a week she had told no one about.
The warmth of him did not move. He had seen the manifest. He had come back tonight to stand vigil beside a locker she might one day open from the inside.
"I needed to know," he said quietly, "that you were still here not to open it."
She left her fingers where they were. So did he.
