Each step was a sentence. As Elan descended, the ash of remembered winters sifted from the stair treads. He kept counting in his head—six, full, again—like a knot keeping them from unraveling. Voices, or perhaps memories pretending to be voices, spilled up from the stairwell: a woman humming while she repaired a child's shoe, a bell at market noon, a dog barking through rain. They were not his, but they felt necessary, as if the world stitched itself with the small things that people assumed were insignificant.