Rosa and Mado had settled into a rhythm. Tonight, they left the office together at dusk, the sky already dimmed to a flat gray that makes the streetlamps seem indecently bright. Mado locks the door with care, testing the handle once, twice, before turning away. Rosa watches the motion and files it where she keeps other useful habits.

“You live far?” Rosa asks.

“Far enough,” Mado says. “Not far to walk.”

They set off at Mado’s pace, which is steady and unapologetic. Her cane taps against the pavement, a sound that threads itself into the city’s rhythm—boots, carts, voices, the distant rumble of a truck she does not look at. Rosa finds herself matching the pace without thinking. She realizes, with a faint start, that this is the first time since Tuscany that she has walked beside someone without scanning ahead for danger every few steps.

Mado’s building is narrow and older than the office by a century at least. The stairwell smells of damp tobacco and mold. Mado takes the stairs slowly, one hand on the rail, the other on the cane, pausing once on the landing. She does not apologize. Rosa does not offer help.

The apartment is small but carefully kept. There is a table by the window, two chairs that do not match, a narrow bed folded up against the wall. A shelf of books runs the length of one side—manuals, ledgers, a few novels with cracked spines. The kitchen is barely a kitchen at all, just a counter, a small stove, and a cupboard whose door hangs slightly askew.

“You can sit,” Mado says, hanging her coat. “Or you can cut bread. Whichever makes you feel more useful.”

Rosa smiles and reaches for the bread. It is dense and a little stale, but solid. Hearty. She slices it carefully, listening to Mado move about the room behind her—metal clinking, a pan being set down, the hiss of a flame.

They eat at the small table, knees nearly touching. The soup is thin but hot, flavored with garlic and something sharp Rosa can’t place. Mado pours a little wine into chipped cups and raises hers briefly, not in a toast, just an acknowledgment.

Outside, footsteps pass, a voice laughs too loudly, then fades. Rosa realizes she is listening less carefully than she has been, and that the room feels—if not safe—then contained.

“You don’t eat like someone who’s alone,” Mado says after a moment.

Rosa looks up. “What does that mean?”

“You don’t rush. You don’t hoard.”

“I suppose I haven’t learned yet.”

Mado’s gaze is steady, not prying. “You will,” she says. “Or you’ll refuse. That’s also a skill.”

After supper, Mado clears the table and brings out a small tin of cigarettes. She offers one. Rosa hesitates, then takes it. Mado lights it for her without ceremony. They sit by the window, smoke drifting upward. From here, the street looks almost ordinary. A man pushes a bicycle. A woman leans out a window to shake a rug. The illusion is nearly convincing.

“You write letters,” Mado says.

Rosa stiffens slightly. “How did you—”

“Ink on your fingers,” Mado says, lifting her own hand. “And the way you watch the post.”

Rosa exhales. “Yes.”

“Do you get answers?”

“Sometimes.”

Mado nods, as if that answers everything. “Sometimes is good. Who is it you write to?”

Rosa stills. “My colleague. Viola.” Then, almost too quickly: “She had polio in childhood. I cared for her.”

Mado considers her for a second, watching, waiting. For a second Rosa’s stomach lurches, thinking she has said the wrong thing, said too much, forced Viola into tens of boxes too small for her. The lie feels wrong, disrespectful without her there to smirk at, to squeeze her shoulder as if reaffirming that the character she was playing was just that.

Rosa’s body does something then, tenses and lurches all at once, and Mado’s face changes slightly, slowly. Her face softens, and the lines around her face begin to settle into something resembling a smile. Rosa adjusts. Not accusatory. Conspiratorial.

The invitation sits between them as she tries to gather her words.

Tell me about her, then.

There is a knock at the door. Rosa’s body reacts before her mind does, every muscle tightening. Mado notices and raises a hand—not to calm her, but to signal quiet.

She moves to the door, checks the latch, opens it a fraction. A boy stands outside, no more than sixteen, a satchel slung over his shoulder. He hands Mado a folded piece of paper without a word and leaves.

Mado closes the door and locks it. She does not open the paper immediately.

“Is that—” Rosa begins.

“Work,” Mado says. She tucks it into her jacket pocket. “Not tonight.”

Rosa watches her carefully now, seeing the room differently; the ledgers, the careful order, the absence of anything decorative. A place designed to be left quickly, if needed.

“You don’t have to stay,” Mado says. “But you can.”

“I’d like to,” Rosa says. The words surprise her with their certainty.

They talk, then, about smaller things. About the office, the man who speaks too loudly, the woman who sharpens her pencils obsessively. About food, about the weather turning. Mado tells a story about a stamp that once traveled across three borders without anyone noticing. Rosa listens, absorbing not just the story but the way Mado tells it - what she leaves out, where she pauses.

At some point, the conversation slows. The cigarettes burn down to their ends.

Rosa stands to leave, pausing at the door, looking at a photo of a soldier, a young boy’s portrait. She stares for a second, before realisation catches up with her, and she turns away as if it has burned.

Mado laughs softly as she stands. “I tell people he is my brother. He is gone all the same.”

She hands Rosa a small bundle wrapped in paper.

“For tomorrow,” she says. “Bread, a little cheese. You’ll forget otherwise.”

“Thank you,” Rosa says. The words feel inadequate, but true.

“There are others,” Mado says, as she turns the latch. “People who wait together. It helps some of them. It might help you.”

Rosa thinks of letters, of silence, of stamps that promise safety. “I’d like that.”

“Good,” Mado says. “We’ll see.”

On the stairs, Rosa descends slowly, aware of her body again, of the city pressing in. But something has shifted. Rosa pulls her coat tighter and walks on, carrying the taste of garlic, the weight of paper, and the knowledge that tonight, at least, someone knows where she is. The fear is still there, sharp and familiar—but now it shares space with something else.

Connection, she thinks. Perhaps simply company.

Now alone inside her sparsely decorated apartment, Mado smiles nearly imperceptibly as she closes the door, locks the deadbolt.

She reflects on Rosa: how glad she is to know her and the sense of purpose that it adds to her days just to be able to offer the young woman some small reprieve from a hostile world.

She's stronger than she knows, Mado thinks.

Her brow furrows as she recalls the way she could practically hear Rosa's heartbeat quicken. The slightest environmental shift seemed to set off a cascade of instinctual responses, to signal her muscles to twitch into some sort of hypervigilant armor.

Mado herself was no stranger to living with that level of agitation. She knew from experience that when Rosa left the solace of the stairwell, she would find the streetlights that had seemed garish and intrusive on their walk from the office to instead be wholly insufficient now that night had bloomed fully. The soft yellow lights would pour onto the street with exactly the same intensity, but the gaps between them would feel much longer now, with only the sound of her own footfalls to dampen her troubled thoughts.

Mado sits down, reaches for a cigarette and lights it without necessarily intending to. She is grateful for the luxury of a moment where she feels safe enough to allow her thoughts to wander:

I've spent a great deal of my life alone in rooms with only one other person, she muses. I have shared such precious moments with such precious people.

Her pupils dilate as she thinks of passing those months—those years—with a series of others, amassing memories and laughter, allowing each of them to claim some particular part of her brain which was somehow suited only to them. All that living, she thinks, all that secret living and loving, all held behind closed doors in sacred places.

She sighs and watches idly as the ash from her cigarette falls onto her lap.

When you live your life in a series of long, holy entanglements like that... much of that life is held by only you and one other. Massive chunks of time during which only one other soul bore witness to the fact that you were. You existed. You spoke. You became. And so did they, and you are the only one that saw it happen.

The moments have begun to feel heavy again. Mado tries to swallow them, but she cannot swallow fast enough.

When you lose one of them, Mado reminds herself, then it's just you. You, left with the whole thing, and it is double or more what you bargained for. Left to carry the blessed burden of all that shared time...

She swallows again, hard.

It all crystallizes inside you the moment they're gone, and from there, it gets harder to hold. It gets bulky. Cumbersome. Sometimes sharp. You slip. You forget.

The exigency fades, wanes.

But the magnitude never does.

It compounds.

Quietly, you feel your lungs fill with what you had and lost until finally, and she laughs the strange laugh of someone whose hurt has come full circle, you find that you have negative buoyancy.

Briefly, the sound of her neighbor's heavy boots lumbering up the stairs interrupts her reverie. She hears him unlock his door, step into an apartment she has never seen but knows must look much like her own. She considers, for a moment, knocking on his door. Maybe he feels this way too. Maybe he would like to sit with her a while.

She revels in a moment without thought, until inevitably, her buoyancy tugs her back down, into her own depths.

Being negatively buoyant doesn't mean you're not worthy of air or of the sun. It doesn't even preclude the possibility of reaching the surface. But it does mean that your lungs have less room for air. It does mean that your body will default to sinking. It does mean working very hard to do what seems effortless to everyone else. It does mean that your next breath of fresh air will demand the sacrifice of something hallowed.

Her thoughts turn again to Rosa, to the honor and privilege she feels at the prospect of being entrusted with her secrets, with her quiet moments. But within her gratitude, there is a mounting trepidation.

What if Rosa were to...

Her eyes snap open, her tired mind unwilling to entertain this line of thought.

Mado puts out her cigarette and stands, begins her bedtime routine without ceremony. She takes comfort in the regimen and allows her own rote movements to soothe her leaden head.

By the time she lowers herself onto her small bed, Mado feels only a dull exhaustion, weariness inundating every empty space it could find within her, claiming each gap all the way down to her bones and leaving no room for conscious thought or attention. If her fatigue had left room enough for her thoughts to get a foothold, she may have thought how this is a rare and strange form kindness, this way our brains have of moving to protect us when we encounter a thought that is more than we can bear.

The bed adjusts to her weight; its old metal frame creaks out in tiny protest, but it barely manages to register a single complaint before Mado is fast asleep.

She dreams that she is drowning.