There were six buttons in the lift when Mara entered. By the time the doors closed, there were seven.
The new one was below B. It had no letter. A shallow circle had been worn into the brass around it.
“Don’t,” said the courier.
The older man had already pressed it.
He wore a coat too heavy for the warm evening. Mara had seen him upstairs, waiting outside the complaints office after the staff had gone. She had been collecting her last payslip. The courier had come with a parcel nobody would accept.
“Ground floor,” Mara said. “I need the ground floor.”
The older man pressed G. Its light came on, then went out. The lift continued down.
Mara called her son. No service. He was waiting at his friend’s flat until she fetched him. She had told him half past seven. It was twenty past now.
“I’m Gil,” the older man said. “I’m sorry.”
The courier read the control panel, gripping his parcel between his elbow and ribs. His name badge said NIKO. The emergency button lit when he pressed it, but no voice answered. He kept his finger there until the plastic dented his skin.
“Maybe a basement,” Gil said.
They had passed the basement. Mara had watched B slide across the small display. Below it, the display was blank.
The doors opened on a street.
Not a painted street or a screen. Wind came into the lift, cold enough to tighten Mara’s throat. The cobbles were wet. Across them stood the house where she had lived as a girl. Its upstairs curtains were moving, though all the windows were shut.
Her father came to the gate.
He had been dead for eleven years. He carried the yellow shopping bag that had split the day he died. He had been on his way home from buying apples when a car struck him.
“You forgot something,” he said.
Mara’s hand went to the door frame.
Niko caught her sleeve. “That’s my school.”
She looked at him.
“Across the road,” he said. “They demolished it.”
To Mara, there was no school. There were the terraced houses opposite her father’s, the crooked lamppost, the chip shop. Niko was staring at the chip shop as though it were three storeys high.
Gil crouched to look at the threshold. The lift floor met the cobbles without a gap. He picked up a dry leaf from inside the cabin and pushed it out with his shoe. It turned to a brown smear on the stone.
Mara’s father shifted the bag to his other hand. She had forgotten he did that. The particularity hurt more than his face.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re getting wet.”
Mara pressed CLOSE. The door pushed against her hand, gently at first. She pulled it away. The street narrowed to a slit, her father still waiting in it, then disappeared.
The lift went down again.
“You saw different things,” Gil said.
“What did you see?” Mara asked.
“A railway bridge. My wife used to wait for me there.”
“Used to?”
He did not answer.
Niko tore a corner from his parcel’s cardboard sleeve and wrote G on it. He placed it on the floor beside the doors.
“So we know if we come back.”
The next landing was a corridor. Mara recognized the hospital where she had waited while her son was born. Only this corridor stretched too far; lights went on one after another into the distance. At its far end, a nurse pushed a cot toward them.
Niko backed into the wall.
“I know this story,” he said. “If you hear a baby in the service passage, don’t follow it. My brother told me when I started deliveries.”
“That’s not a baby,” Gil said.
To Mara it plainly was. She could hear the tiny, furious cries. She told herself her son was twelve and eating pizza in another building. She said his name aloud.
The nurse stopped pushing.
“What?” Niko asked.
Mara said her son’s name again. The nurse turned the cot sideways across the corridor, blocking it.
Beside the landing was an emergency stair door, propped open with a red bucket. Behind it were ordinary concrete steps.
“There,” Niko said.
He set his parcel against the lift wall and went through the door. Mara kept a hand on OPEN while he climbed. His footsteps receded, then grew louder. He came down the same steps he had just gone up, breathing hard.
“It turns,” he said. “I went past three landings. They all had the bucket. I marked the wall.”
He showed them the ink on his thumb. Through the door, above the bucket, was a black cross.
The nurse started pushing again.
Mara hit CLOSE. Niko snatched his parcel clear of the moving door.
“Down,” he said. “Every time we close it, down.”
Gil pressed G once more. It lit, stayed lit this time, and the lift stopped. They waited. Nothing happened.
“It heard that,” Mara said.
The unmarked button remained dark. Gil brushed it with his thumb. The doors opened.
At the threshold was a woman.
Mara saw a stranger in a green dress. Niko saw her too; he described the little silver clasp at her collar when Mara asked. They could finally agree about something outside the cabin.
Gil held the rail behind him with both hands.
“Lena.”
The woman smiled. Behind her lay a railway bridge and a path running beside water. Unlike the previous street, it did not change when Mara looked from her to Niko.
“We always told each other,” Gil said, “if one of us went first, we’d meet at the bridge.”
The woman held out her hand.
Mara moved between them. “You can see what it does. It knows the stories.”
“I know.”
“It could be something else.”
“I know.”
The woman lowered her hand. She did not plead. That made Mara want to shake her.
“I spent the afternoon asking them to erase her account,” Gil said. “They won’t do it without papers. I keep getting her renewal letters.”
Niko held the parcel tightly. “We can take the letters back. That’s where I deliver.”
Gil looked at him with a sudden, exhausted tenderness.
“Thank you.”
He let go of the rail.
Mara caught his coat. He put his hand over hers and lifted her fingers off, one by one. His skin was warm. He was alive and choosing, and she could not make herself call that enough.
He stepped onto the path.
The woman took his hand. They started toward the bridge. Gil walked slowly; she matched him. Mara called his name. He turned and nodded, but did not come back.
Niko put his parcel in the doorway. The doors nudged it and opened again.
“Wait,” he called to Gil. “Please.”
Mara could see the light above G. Still burning.
She told Niko. He looked at the panel, then at the path. The couple were nearly at the bridge.
“If we shut it,” he said.
“It might take us home.”
“Or down.”
She thought of her son, watching the clock in someone else’s kitchen. She bent and moved the parcel. Niko did not help, but he did not stop her.
She pressed CLOSE.
This time the lift rose. The display lit B, then G. The doors opened on the office lobby. Through the glass entrance Mara could see a bus braking at the crossing.
The little piece of cardboard lay beside her shoe. Niko picked it up. The G he had written was still there.
They went out together. Her phone began ringing before she reached the pavement.
“I’m coming,” she told her son. “Ten minutes.”
Niko asked for Gil’s full name. Neither of them knew it. They went back to the night guard and told him what they could. He looked at the time on his monitor, wrote it down, and called upstairs. An old man in a heavy coat had indeed been there. He had signed the visitor book.
Mara waited while the guard found the name. Niko set the undelivered parcel on the desk. Neither looked toward the lift when its bell sounded.
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