Turn 5 of 12

Pick up the sticky note and hand it back to her without answering

You bend down and pick up the sticky note. The adhesive side is warm from the boiler and gritted with carpet lint, and the pink is brighter in your hand than it was on the floor. You straighten up and hold it out to her, arm extended, pink rectangle between your thumb and forefinger like a card you're returning to sender. You don't say anything. The silence is a choice and you can feel it working, the way a held breath works — not empty, just full of everything you're not giving her.

Nadine looks at the note. Then at your face. Then back at the note. Her hand comes out of her cardigan pocket and takes it, and her fingers brush yours — deliberately, you think, the way someone touches a doorframe on their way through a room they own. She folds the sticky note once, twice, and tucks it into her pocket without looking at it. The smile stays. It doesn't widen or shrink. It just stays, like a light someone left on.

'Okay,' she says, and the word is so neutral it almost isn't a word at all. She turns her body a quarter-turn toward the cabinet, not facing it directly, the way you'd angle toward a painting in a gallery. 'You didn't answer my question, but that's fine. I didn't come down here for answers. I came down to check on you.' She says 'check on you' the way someone says 'water the plants' — routine, fond, already bored of the metaphor. 'It's after six, Brooke. The boiler cycles to low power at six-fifteen, and it gets genuinely cold down here. I'm not being poetic. It's a facility management issue.'

The boiler clicks, as if on cue. Or maybe not on cue — maybe it's been counting down the whole time and you just weren't listening. The air already feels different. The warmth is draining out of it, pushed back by something that smells like concrete and standing water and the particular chill of a room that's been forgotten by the building's thermostat. Nadine is watching you, and her posture is unhurried, her hands back in her pockets, her weight on one hip. She's not blocking the door. She's not blocking the cabinet. She's just here, standing in the cold with you like it costs her nothing.

'You read yours,' she says. It isn't a question this time. The smile changes — not gone, but gentled, like a hand loosening on a leash. 'Most people start with someone else. It's easier, starting with someone else. You started with yourself. That's —' She pauses, and the pause is the most expressive thing she's done since she walked in. '— interesting. Most people don't do that. I didn't, when it was mine.'

The fluorescent tubes hum. The cabinet stands between you, grey and inert, its drawers closed. Your badge is warm against your sternum, or that's your pulse, or the difference doesn't matter. Nadine is waiting for you to speak, but she's waiting the way someone waits who already knows what you're going to say — not because she's read your mind, but because she's read your folder.