The coffee was the same as it always was, which was how Rhys preferred it. Medium, black, from the cart on the corner of Fifth and Morrow, where a man named (or at least badged) Terry had been making the same coffee in the same cups for as long as Rhys had been taking this route to the office. There was comfort in that. Reproducibility. You could build a morning around it.

Terry didn’t ask for his order anymore. He’d stopped sometime in the second month, maybe the third, and now the cup was simply waiting by the time Rhys’s card cleared. He had never decided how he felt about this. On the one hand, it was efficient. On the other hand, it meant he was legible, that his habits had accumulated into a pattern visible enough for someone else to anticipate. He was not sure those were different things.

He walked his usual route: south on Morrow, left on Callender, through the small triangle of sidewalk that the city had optimistically designated a plaza but which contained only a single bench and a tree that had never, in Rhys’s memory, looked entirely healthy. A woman in a yellow coat was feeding pigeons from a paper bag. He noticed her the way he noticed most things on this route: as confirmation that the world was behaving consistently, that Tuesday looked like Tuesday.

He was three blocks past the cart, cup nearly empty, when he noticed the door.

It was set into the side of a building he passed every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. A narrow limestone thing wedged between a dry cleaner and a place that sold custom blinds. He knew the building the way you know any building you’ve walked past two hundred times without looking at: incompletely, confidently, memory filling in details it was never asked to store.

The door was green. It had probably always been green. He could not explain why he was only seeing it now.

He stopped. A man behind him made a sound of annoyance and split around him like water around a stone.

The door was unremarkable in every way except that Rhys could not account for the gap in his attention. The paint was slightly weathered, the brass handle tarnished to a color that suggested years of use. There was no buzzer, no signage, no indication of what might be on the other side. Just the door, set into the limestone as though it had always been there, as though it had simply been waiting for him to look.

He stood there for four seconds. He knew it was four seconds because he counted them, which was not something he normally did, which was perhaps why he remembered it later.

Then he finished his coffee, adjusted the strap of his bag, and walked to work.

The block after the plaza was the one he liked least. A stretch of older buildings, most of them commercial on the ground floor with floors above that appeared to serve no purpose anyone had ever explained. A tax preparation office, closed and dark despite the hour. A phone repair shop with a handwritten sign in the window that had been there so long the ink had faded to the color of old bruises. A stretch of plywood hoarding around something that had been under construction, or scheduled for demolition, or simply abandoned to the process, for as long as Rhys could remember. Someone had wheat-pasted a series of posters across it at some point, bands or exhibitions or causes, and the weather had gotten at them until they were a single-layered thing, anonymous and soft at the edges.

He passed a man in a reflective vest eating a sandwich on an upturned crate. The man did not look up.

The next block was better, or at least busier. A cluster of people outside a bakery, breath visible in the cold. A cyclist threading the gap between a delivery truck and the curb with the focused calm of someone who had made peace with the odds. Rhys moved with the sidewalk, adjusting without thinking, the micro-choreography of a city morning so practiced it had stopped registering as movement at all.

There was a tree halfway down the block that had buckled the sidewalk around its roots. The city had filled the cracks with a tar so black it looked wet even when it wasn’t. He stepped over it as he always did, left foot first, without breaking stride.

A woman was arguing quietly into her phone outside a glass-fronted rental agency, her free hand pressed flat against the window as though steadying herself. Inside, behind her reflection, the desks were empty. A single ceiling tile had come loose and hung at an angle, unaddressed. Rhys did not slow down.