The girl was sitting on the edge of a bed that wasn't there.
She looked like a smudge on a window. I had to squint to see her. She was young—maybe twenty, maybe less—and she was wearing a sweater that was three sizes too big for her. She was staring at her own hands like she wasn't sure they belonged to her body.
"She's fading," I whispered.
"She chose it," Cael said.
He didn't pull out the notebook yet. He just stood there, watching.
I walked closer. The air around her felt cold. Not the cold of ice, but the cold of a room where the heater had been turned off for years.
"Hello," I said.
She didn't look up. "Did you see me come in?"
"I see you now," I said.
"Most people don't," she whispered. "I practiced. If you stay quiet enough, if you don't make a sound, people eventually forget you're in the room. Then they stop expecting things. Then they stop hurting you because they don't remember you're there to be hurt."
My throat felt tight. It was like looking into a mirror I had tried to smash a long time ago. I knew that practice. I knew the way you make yourself small so the debt collectors don't see you, so the boss doesn't yell, so the world just passes you by like you're a ghost before you're even dead.
"Is it selfish?" she asked suddenly. She finally looked at me. Her eyes were wide and hollow. "Is it selfish to want to be the one who leaves first? To go before anyone can tell you to get out?"
I froze.
The wet sand in my chest felt heavier. I thought about the noodles. I thought about the unfinished sentence on my phone. I thought about how many times I had prayed for the day to just end so I wouldn't have to be Marisol anymore.
Is it?
"I don't know," I said. My voice was shaking.
The girl stood up. She started to walk toward the gray horizon where the other souls went. She was almost gone—just a flicker of a shadow—and then she stopped.
She turned back.
"Did anyone ever ask you to stay?" she asked.
The question hit me in the stomach like a physical blow.
I thought about my daughter's message on my phone that I never answered. I thought about my grandson, Eric, with his fever. I thought about how I had spent my whole life trying to be invisible so the weight wouldn't crush me, but the weight was the only thing that told me I was still there.
"No," I choked out. "No. I just wanted to disappear too. I wanted to leave before the lights went out on their own. I wanted to be gone before anyone noticed I was failing."
I was crying. It wasn't a pretty cry. My nose was getting stuffed, and my breath was coming in short, jagged pieces. My chest was heaving. Everything I had carried since that midnight with the noodles—every fear for my grandson, every cent of debt, every ounce of exhaustion, it all came out.
I felt useless. I felt hollow.
The girl looked at me for a long time. Then, she gave a small, sad nod. She stepped back into the gray.
"I'm staying for a bit," she whispered. "Just to see."
And then she was gone.
Cael moved then.
He produced the small, worn notebook. He didn't look at a file. He didn't mention a "subject" or a "case".
He opened the book to a page near the end. He looked at the name.
"Elena," he said.
His voice was careful. It wasn't the voice of a bureaucrat reading a list. It was the voice of someone holding something fragile.
He drew a single line through the name. Not harsh. Just a quiet closing of a door.
I stood there, my hands over my face, my shoulders shaking. I waited for him to say something about the process. I waited for him to tell me we had to move on to the next step of the deal.
He didn't.
He didn't move toward the exit. He just stood there, a few feet away from me, in the middle of that empty, gray nowhere.
He stayed.
He didn't offer me a tissue. He didn't tell me it would be okay. He just stood in the silence with me while I fell apart.
The misunderstanding from the hallway—the coldness, it didn't need words to fix. It was being fixed by the fact that he was still there.
My eyes were leaking, and my throat was raw. I looked up at him through the blur. He was watching the spot where the girl had disappeared.
His armor hadn't just slipped. It was gone.
He looked tired. He looked like he had been reading names for four hundred years and was only just now hearing them.
I wiped my face with my sleeve.
"Is it done?" I asked. My voice was a wreck.
"It is done," he said.
Simple. Blunt.
He looked at me then. He didn't say that I had passed the test. He didn't say I had earned my second chance.
He just waited for me to breathe again.