The night betrayed me again.
It has a way of stealing the hours while pretending to hand them back. I stared at the red digits on the bedside clock—1:02—and hated that I'd looked. The apartment lay around me the way a suit lies in its box: pressed, expensive, not meant for sleep. Everything was chosen. Nothing was lived in. A designer once told me the palette was sophisticated. Tonight it felt like the color of silence.
I got up because lying down was a kind of drowning. I showered and shaved as if a meeting were waiting, knotted a tie I didn't need, slipped on the jacket as if a doorman might judge me. It wasn't that I had anywhere new to go. It's just that getting ready can pass for purpose if you don't look too closely.
The building knew my footsteps. The elevator let me in with that practiced sigh old machines have when they've seen all our ambitions come and go. On my floor the carpet swallowed sound; the framed awards lined the hall like polite witnesses. My office door opened to the city in its late costume—windows lit like constellations, streets rinsed in a kind of cold gold.
That's when I heard it again.
Not a voice. Not even a word. A tiny sound, the size of a decision. The little pop a jar lid makes when the seal gives up. I turned and checked the sensible things: the mini-fridge, the drawers, the credenza with its careful trophies. Everything was where it was supposed to be. And yet it wasn't. I sat down and let the chair carry my weight like a secret.
Rain began. On glass, rain becomes currency. Each drop a coin, spinning, flashing, sliding down the pane until it buys the dark another minute. The city blurred into something almost tender. I watched the lights turn to soft circles and let my breath find them.
The sound came again. This time it brought a body with it.
A boy—eight, maybe—sat cross-legged on the carpet near the edge of my desk. Hoodie sleeves too long, sneakers frayed at the toes. In his hands, a glass jar, and inside the jar a warm, pulsing light, as if he had trapped a small summer and brought it here. He held it with both palms, careful the way kids are careful when no one taught them but their hands know anyway.
"How did you get in here?" I asked.
"Through the hall," he said, matter-of-fact, as if I were the strange one.
"Where are your parents?"
"Away."
"This isn't a place for children."
"I know," he said, like it was funny. "This is where dreams come to die."
I laughed because the sentence surprised my mouth. "How do they die?"
"Like people," he said, still watching the jar. "When you stop looking after them, they disappear. Like yours did."
Strangely, I couldn't reply. "What do you mean mine are dead? I have achieved… what I… wanted." Even I couldn't believe what I was trying to say. How could he? Silence fell around us. He didn't say anything else, and I didn't want to ask anything else.
"What is that?" I asked at last, nodding at the glass.
"Secrets," he said.
"Can you tell me one?"
"Not yet."
"Well , how about your name?"
He looked up at that, as if names still mattered. "Leo."
"Leo," I repeated, to see how it sat in the air between us.
He stood and tipped his chin toward the door, an invitation drawn with a line you could step over or not. "Come on," he said.
"Where are we going?"
"To find what's lost."
"What, exactly, is lost?"
He just looked at me. It wasn't a challenge. It was patience, and for some reason I didn't ask him to explain himself again. He cradled the jar and we left the office—me locking a door out of habit, him moving as if locks were a rumor.
The night guard barely lifted his eyes. The lobby glass let the rain paint us both into the world outside. Leo walked like a kid who'd memorized shortcuts: across the plaza, down the steps by the newsstand that had forgotten to close, past a florist sleeping under paper cones, along a street that smelled like warm metal and wet bread. Whenever we hit a wider patch of dark, he held the jar a little higher, and the light inside bloomed in answer.
"What's in there, really?" I asked once.
"Secretes," he said, mispronouncing it the way children refuse to be corrected, and grinned. "Shh."
We turned where the city turned low and practical—older brick, tired paint, signs that worked only part-time. It occurred to me to ask if this was safe, and then I realized safe is a word people use to avoid the truer one, which is alive.
The clinic looked used up and still trying. Two stories. A wooden bench that had earned its splinters. The automatic doors were off for the night; you could tell by the way the gap between them was honest about being closed. Lettering on the glass that might have been white once repeated its name to no one.
There was a man by the curb.
He stood with his hands in his coat like he'd been practicing not having hands for years. He made a small circle, the kind you hope no one sees, stopped, looked at the door, reached out to touch the seam where metal met glass, and retreated as if he'd found fire. He did it again. Not exactly the same. A man revising his note to himself and never sending it.
"Who is he?" I asked.
"One of the forgotten," Leo said.
"How do you know him?"
Leo shrugged without moving his shoulders. "He comes here on Thursdays to find himself."
"Why Thursdays?"
He kept his eyes on the man and smiled like he'd been waiting for the question. "Thursday is office hours for courage."
I wanted to laugh again. Not because it was ridiculous, but because it fit in that small way truths do when they're wearing plain clothes. "And tonight?"
"Practice," Leo said, pleased with the word. "You're good at practice. You just practice the wrong things."
We watched. The man—Hale, I would learn—made his circle smaller. For three breaths his fingertips rested on the metal strip. A victory, or a bruise. He put his phone in his hand, then back in his pocket, then in his hand again, the kind of movement that pretends to be doing something while the heart gets its courage together. He stepped back finally, the way you step back from a window you know you can't climb through, and set his feet for leaving.
"Is this my door?" I asked the boy, the question surprising us both.
"Maybe later," Leo said, and snugged the towel around his jar so the light narrowed to a ribbon. "Right now it's his."
"What happens if he can't do it on Thursday either?"
Leo thought about that like thought was a game you could play with someone else's rules. "Some doors open when you learn to breathe," he said, and then, softer, "Some open when you learn to wait."
We stood there one more minute because sometimes you owe a place that. Then the man walked away looking like he'd meant to go somewhere else all along, and the rain made coins on the street for him to step on without owning.
Leo turned toward the dark that had brought us and I followed. He didn't reach for my hand. He didn't need to. The jar glowed enough to be a direction. On the way back I tried to decide whether I'd invite sense into this, or whether sense would only make it smaller.
At the corner by the pharmacy, where the light goes from orange to ordinary, I looked down to ask if he would come again. He had already gone, not like a trick, not like smoke, just like a kid who knows how to slip between streetlights. I was left with rain and breath and a sentence small enough to carry without dropping.
Thursday, then.