The lobby is all glass, and the glass is full of mist. The city settles onto it without your seeing it come. Outside, a window washer's cradle creeps down the façade, a man hung in the air scrubbing the sky. You watch him rather than the receptionist, who is already holding out a plastic rectangle and a marker.

"You write your first name, we laminate it, it's for life." She smiles the smile of people who have repeated the same sentence for fifteen years.

The marker is nearly dry. The rectangle is white, clean, the size of a confession. Two names live in you: the one on the file, upstairs, in a folder; and your own, Sasha, the one no one here has said yet. Only one will fit in the sleeve without creasing.