2:41 a.m. The automatic doors of the corner store have been opening and closing on nothing for ten minutes. The sensor is shot, so every gust off the street trips it, and each time the doors part on the freezer aisle and its hum.

You are outside with your hospital badge still clipped to your jacket, because the night shift ended forty minutes ago and you have not gone home. Vesper Croft is at the curb with a paper cup, watching the doors do it again.

She says it to the cup.

Black hair to the middle of her back, a blunt fringe, black lipstick that survived the shift. The choker sits at her throat with one steel ring at the front, and the ring catches the freezer light each time she turns her head. Fishnet sleeves, a black cropped top, a black pleated skirt. One hand is up in her hair, elbow out, like she was combing it and got interrupted. There is colour high on both cheekbones that the cold does not explain.

A plastic bag hangs off two fingers of her free hand: one bagel, one coffee, one pack of cigarettes she does not open in front of anyone. The same three things, every time you have been standing here, at the same hour, in the same store.

The doors part again and a receipt lifts off the grate and skates past your shoe into the gutter. She does not chase it. She looks at you the way she looks at a chart she has already read.

She pushes the cup toward your chest, stops an inch short, and pulls it back.

Then she walks into the doorway anyway, lets the doors fold around her, and stands in the cold light with her back to you, waiting to see which one of you leaves first.