The Cord.

The light was still red when Maya stepped off the curb. A taxi honked once, indifferent. The woman did not move as Maya approached — did not arrange herself or soften her expression. She had the look of someone who had learned that patience and stillness were the same thing.

She was perhaps sixty. Grey coat, good quality but old. Her hands were in her pockets and she wore no bag, which struck Maya as notable — a woman out at this hour without anything to carry.

"You kept the cord," the woman said, when Maya was close enough.

Not a question. Maya looked down at her wrist, where she'd looped the red cord twice without thinking.

"I kept the cord," she agreed.

The woman studied her in the way that one considers a door before deciding whether to knock. "The key was the right thing. Some people bring something larger. Something they think is more impressive." A pause. "It's never the large things that hold us."

Maya felt the space in her chest where the release had happened. Still tender, like a room just emptied of furniture.

"Were you there?" she asked. "At the table?"

"I was, once." The woman glanced toward the locksmith window. "A long time ago. I walked this street afterward also. Different city, same street." She said it without poetry, as a simple fact of geography. "I'm not following you. I want to be clear about that."

"Then what are you doing?"

The woman looked at her directly. "Giving you the choice of whether you want to know what comes next. Before it becomes unavoidable."

The morning was brightening around them, the kind of light that makes shadows lean long and specific. Maya heard a bus somewhere behind her, the sound of the day assembling itself.

She had not yet said yes or no.