Just keep walking. No one has any reason to think you don't belong here. For all they know, you're just another face in the crowd. No one suspects a thing. Just. Keep. Walking.

There was nowhere to look that didn't feel like a reminder. Every flower was her favorite color, every shop somewhere she would've loved. Out of the corners of his eyes, every face looked like hers. It seemed like a betrayal, being here without her. The things they'd talked about for hours felt awful without her there.

He needed a way to get her back. But what could he do? There was no insane plan that would work this time. No one of his classic schemes would have a chance of succeeding. They knew him. They knew every part of his mind, every angle he could devise. She was gone forever. And he could do nothing about it. He couldn't save her, couldn't help at all.

Another unpleasant thought came into his mind. Where was he supposed to go? He didn't have any friends. No family, nowhere to stay. The most likely option at this point was to sleep under a bench in the park. It could be worse.

She could've done something. Her plans actually worked. She was the smartest person he'd ever known. She knew so much about the world. But in the end, it hadn't helped her. Not much could've.

A tap on the shoulder jerked him abruptly from his ruminations.

"Sir, you dropped this."

He turned and found himself face to face with a woman, perhaps forty, with short, dark hair and a glint of something in her eyes that he couldn't quite interpret. She held out a palm, showing him a small black flash drive.

"No, sorry, that's not mine." He tried to sound casual, to keep the metallic note of residual panic from his voice, as if today was just a normal day and not the day that the world as he knew it had fallen apart.

The woman held his gaze. "Yes, it is yours. You just dropped it."

"No, I –" Something about the way she was looking at him made his denial catch in his throat.

"It's yours. You'll want to be more careful with it. Who knows what someone could do with the kind of information you can store on one of these." Her voice was measured, unnervingly deliberate. Something about the way the word 'someone' came out of her mouth made the back of his head start to buzz with a mixture of panic and possibility.

He chose his response carefully. "You're right. It's mine. I must have dropped it." He reached out, grabbed the drive from her open hand, and closed his fist around it. It felt flimsy in his grip, the cheap black plastic of a flash drive that he had certainly never seen before, but that was currently his only hope at getting out of this alive.