The building looked exactly the same from the outside. This was somehow the worst part. She had half-expected it to look different — smaller, or sadder, or changed in some visible way that would correspond to what it had meant to her. Instead it looked exactly like a building, doing what buildings do, holding its floors and its stairwells and its air conditioning with complete indifference to what had happened inside it.
A new sign on the third floor: Klarity Finance — Building for Tomorrow.
"Same floor," she said.
"Yes," Aryan said, standing beside her on the pavement. He had been beside her since she picked him up, quiet in the way he was when he was letting her lead, which she had come to understand was not passivity but a specific form of attention. Waiting for what she needed rather than supplying what he thought she needed. Progress, she thought.
"I want to go up," she said. "Is that strange?"
"Do you want me to ask them to let us see the space?"
"No. I just want to stand outside it. That's enough."
They went up. Third floor. The corridor looked the same — the same fluorescent overhead lights, the same slight echo from the concrete floors. The door that had said PayAxis now said Klarity Finance in a different font but the same position on the door, the same height, as if whoever had mounted the new sign had been working from the same template.
She stood in front of it and was quiet for a long time.
"The last day," she said, "I stayed for about four hours after everyone else had left. I was supposed to be there to hand over the keys to the landlord but I kept — I kept moving around the space and picking things up and putting them down. Not packing. I had already packed. Just — touching things. The whiteboard where we'd done the product roadmap. The table where the team ate lunch together. The window where I used to go to make difficult phone calls because the building across the street had a terrace garden and if I looked at the green I could think better." She looked at the door. "I don't know what I was doing. Memorising, maybe."
"Saying goodbye," Aryan said.
"Yes. Probably." She turned to face him. "I needed you here for this because—" She stopped. Tried again. "Because the grief of this place got tangled up with the grief of what you did, and I've been carrying them as the same thing, and they're not. This is the grief of losing something I built, which is mine and legitimate and I am allowed to have it. That is separate from what happened with you and me."
