A Night at the Shopping Centre

Chapter One - The Safe Zone

The shopping centre wasn't supposed to be silent. Andrew had spent two years working the closing shift at the bookshop on the first floor, and even after the last customer wandered out, there was always 'something', the whir of a floor buffer, a caretaker's radio two corridors over, the distant clatter of a shutter rolling down. Tonight there was none of that. He'd ducked into a fitting room at half past nine to avoid his manager's questions about tomorrow's stock count, lost track of time scrolling on his phone, and emerged to find the lights dimmed to their after-hours amber and the main doors sealed tight behind steel shutters.

He'd tried the doors. He'd tried the phone at the security desk, which turned out to be merely decorative. He'd even shouted, once, and felt foolish enough about it that he didn't do it again. Eventually the panic wore itself down into something stranger and quieter, an odd, floating calm. He was locked in a shopping centre until six in the morning, and there was, as far as he could tell, not a single other person in the building.

He stood in the middle of the atrium and just listened. No music. No footsteps but his own. The escalators sat frozen mid-step. Somewhere above him a skylight let in a wash of moonlight, pale and blue, pooling on the tile like water. It should have felt like a horror film. Instead it felt like a museum after closing, like he'd been let in on a secret the building only told when nobody was looking.

That was when he noticed the mannequins.

They stood in every shopfront window, caught in poses that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with him at the same time, one arm cocked on a hip, a chin tilted just so, fabric draped like it had been waiting all day for someone to actually 'see' it. He'd walked past a hundred of them without a second glance on ordinary Tuesdays. Tonight, with no one to watch him watching, he let himself stop.

The first shopfront that caught him wasn't ambitious. It was a streetwear shop he already knew, racks of hoodies and cargo trousers, the kind of shop he could walk into with his mates and walk out of with exactly the thing he'd meant to buy. Safe. Unremarkable. The shutter was only half down, low enough that he could duck under it if he wanted to, which felt like a small, ridiculous crime.

He ducked under it.

Inside, the shop smelled like cedar and new denim. He drifted past the usual shelves, graphic tees, stiff raw denim, a wall of trainers lined up like a jury, until he reached the corner he'd never actually shopped from. Cream-coloured knits. Lavender. A rail of trousers cut high at the waist, wide through the leg, nothing like the straight-cut jeans folded in his own chest of drawers at home.

"Just looking," he said out loud, to no one, and laughed a little at himself for saying it at all. There was no one to perform 'just looking' for. That was the thing, here, tonight, wasn't it, that there was, for once, no audience.

He picked up a pair of the high-waisted trousers first, testing the weight of them in his hands. They were heavier than his jeans, but softer somehow, the fabric falling in a way that denim never did, less like armour, more like water deciding to sit still for a moment. He held them against himself in the black rectangle of a dark window and tried to imagine his own outline changed by them. It wasn't hard to imagine. That surprised him more than anything else.

The jumpers were next. He ran his hand along the rail before he even chose one, cream, then a dove grey, then a lavender so pale it was nearly white, more a suggestion of colour than the colour itself. He'd worn jumpers his whole life, thick cabled things his mother bought him every winter, scratchy at the collar, built to survive weather rather than to feel like anything. These were different. When he lifted the lavender one off its hanger, it barely weighed anything at all, and the wool, if it was wool, had a softness that made him think, absurdly, of the inside of his own wrist.

He didn't decide to try it on so much as find himself already pulling it over his head.

The fitting rooms were unlocked, of course; there was no one left to lock them. He stepped into the last cubicle, pulled the curtain most of the way, and studied himself in the mirror bolted to the wall. His own face looked back at him, a little startled, like it hadn't expected the invitation. The jumper sat loose through the shoulders and dropped past his hips, the sleeves swallowing his hands until only his fingertips showed, and he stood there for a second just breathing, feeling the fabric settle against his skin.

It didn't feel like a costume. That was the thing he hadn't expected. He'd braced himself, without quite admitting it, for the sensation of 'wrongness', the sense that he was playing dress-up in a life that wasn't his. Instead there was only the wool, soft against his forearms, and the strange, warm looseness of a garment that wasn't trying to hold him a certain shape. His jeans, next to it, looked stiff and unconvincing, like they belonged to a stranger.

He found a silk-lined blazer two rails over and layered it on top, just to see, and caught himself smiling at his own reflection, not a smirk, not the little self-conscious grimace he usually gave mirrors, but something looser, more like the beginning of a real smile that hadn't decided yet how far it wanted to go.

'This is stupid,' he thought, from habit, and then, immediately, quieter: 'no, it isn't.'

He turned sideways. He turned back. He lifted his arms slightly, just to watch the sleeves move, and the motion of it, the soft drag of fabric following a half second behind his own body, did something to him he didn't have a word for yet. It wasn't about looking like anyone in particular. It was about the fact that for the first time in longer than he could remember, the clothes on his body felt like they belonged to a decision he'd made, rather than a decision someone else had made for him a long time ago.

Outside the fitting room, the shopping centre was still perfectly silent, the moonlight still glowing over empty walkways, the mannequins still holding their poses for no one. Andrew stood there in a lavender jumper and trousers that weren't his, in a shop that wasn't his, in a night that had accidentally become entirely his own, and understood, not with fireworks, not with some grand revelation, but with the plain, quiet certainty of a fact settling into place, that this was only the first door he was meant to open that night.

He glanced past the half-open shutter toward the darkened directory board at the end of the corridor, its little red dot marking 'You Are Here', and past it, toward the escalator that led up to the first floor, where the boutiques waited with their silk and their lace and their mirrors he had only glanced at before.

He kept the jumper on, and went to go find out what else the night had for him.

Chapter Two: The Boutique

The escalator was dead, of course, so he climbed it like a staircase, his trainers loud against the metal grooves in a building that had otherwise gone completely still. Halfway up, he caught his own reflection sliding along the glass balustrade, lavender jumper, his scuffed jeans, hair a little flattened from where he'd pulled the jumper over it, and thought, not for the first time tonight, that he looked like two different people trying to occupy the same outline.

The first floor was quieter than the ground floor, if that was even possible. He wandered past a phone booth, a pasty stand with its metal shutter down, until the corridor opened up in front of a shop he'd only ever walked past before, the kind of boutique with a single dress in the window instead of a dozen mannequins, lit from below like it was something in a jewellery case.

'Marguerite's', the gold script over the door said. He'd always assumed, from the outside, that it wasn't for him. Tonight the assumption felt like something he'd borrowed from somebody else and never bothered to give back.

This shutter was all the way down, but not locked, just resting on the floor, and when he crouched and pushed, it lifted with a groan loud enough to make him wince and glance over his shoulder, out of habit, at absolutely nobody.

Inside, it smelled like something floral he couldn't name, and cooler than the streetwear shop had been, like the air itself had been pressed and hung on a rail. Where the first shop had been about shape, big jumpers, wide trousers, clothes that gave him room to hide inside them if he wanted, this one was about surface. Everywhere he looked there was texture: lace laid over silk, chiffon so thin it seemed to be barely present at all, a wall of cardigans in colours he didn't have names for, somewhere between pink and grey and gold.

He ran a finger along a rail of skirts before he'd even decided to, and one of them, pleated, falling to somewhere around the knee, a soft rust colour like the last week of October, caught on his hand and swung a little on its hanger, unhurried, like it had all the time in the world to be looked at.

He took it into the fitting room along with a floral tea dress he'd almost talked himself out of and a camisole the colour of the inside of a shell, and for a moment, standing there with his arms full of things he had no plan for, he laughed out loud at himself again, quieter this time, more fond than nervous.

The skirt went on easier than he expected. He'd braced for some complicated arrangement of buttons or zips, but it was just a waistband and a clasp, and then it was simply 'on', sitting at his natural waist in a way his jeans never did, the pleats falling into soft, straight lines around his legs.

He didn't look in the mirror yet. He wanted, for some reason he didn't examine too closely, to feel it first.

He took a step. Then another. The fabric didn't so much move 'with' him as arrive a half-beat after he did, a small delay that turned his ordinary walking into something with an extra rhythm to it, a soft 'shff' against his calves that he could hear in the dead silence of the shop. He'd never in his life paid attention to what walking sounded like. He walked in wider steps, just to hear it more. He turned, fast, just to feel the pleats lift and settle.

Somewhere in the third or fourth turn, he started to feel a little ridiculous, and somewhere just after that, the ridiculousness stopped mattering, the way it does when nobody at all is watching and there is, for once, no one to be ridiculous 'for'.

He layered the camisole under an open cardigan the colour of weak tea, the silk cool and slippery where it touched his skin, nothing like the cotton t-shirts folded in his drawer at home. Everything about it felt slightly out of focus in a good way, like a photograph taken a half-second before the shutter caught something sharper.

Only then did he let himself walk out of the cubicle, past the curtain, to the full-length mirror standing at the end of the row.

He stopped a few feet short of it.

There was a version of this moment he'd half expected, the one where he looked at himself and saw a boy wearing his sister's clothes, some awkward mismatch he'd have to explain away even to an empty room. He made himself walk the rest of the way anyway.

The person in the mirror was not that. She, and the word arrived on its own, unbidden, without any of the fuss he'd braced for, stood with her weight tipped slightly onto one hip, rust-coloured pleats catching the low light, the cardigan slipping just off one shoulder from the turning he'd been doing. Her hair was still a little flattened from the jumper, and her trainers were all wrong, scuffed white things that belonged to an entirely different outfit, and none of it mattered, because the rest of it, the movement, the colour, the soft fall of fabric around legs that had spent a whole life in stiff denim, was so plainly, uncomplicatedly 'right' that the mismatched shoes only made her laugh.

She turned sideways to watch the skirt swing. She lifted onto her toes, just an inch, the way she'd seen dancers do without ever once trying it herself, and the fabric lifted a half-beat behind her again, that same soft delay, like the world had learned to keep pace with her instead of the other way around.

"Oh," she said out loud, to the empty shop, to the dead security cameras, to no one. Just that. It wasn't a big word. It didn't need to be. It was the sound of a question she hadn't known she was carrying finally getting its answer.

She stood there a long moment more, watching herself watch herself, before she remembered there was still an entire dark shopping centre waiting past the boutique's shutter, an entire first floor she hadn't touched yet, an escalator leading further up to places with names like 'Vintage & Vellum' and 'The Powder Room' that she'd never once had a reason to walk into.

She left the trainers on. Everything else, she decided, could wait to be figured out until she saw what else there was.

Chapter Three: Vintage & Vellum

The shop sat at the far end of the first floor, tucked past a shuttered nail bar and a kiosk selling phone chargers nobody bought. Its sign was hand-painted rather than backlit, 'Vintage & Vellum' in looping gold letters over a window crowded with things that didn't match each other on purpose: a beaded flapper dress next to a leather aviator jacket, a rack of parasols leaning against a hatstand crowned with a wide-brimmed straw hat and a spray of paper flowers.

She'd walked past this shop a hundred times without going in, always assuming it was a costume shop, the kind of place that only mattered around Halloween. Standing in front of it now, shutter rolled halfway and easy to duck under, she understood she'd had it backwards. It wasn't costumes. It was decades, all crowded into one small room, waiting to be tried on like question marks.

Inside, the smell was different again, not cedar, not that cool floral hush from Marguerite's, but something warmer, a little like an old book left in the sun, cedar and dust and something faintly like rosewater. The lighting was lower here too, warm bulbs instead of the boutique's clean white ones, and it made everything look a little like it was lit for a photograph nobody had taken yet.

She moved slower in this shop than she had in either of the others. There was too much to take in at once, a rack of polka-dot dresses with skirts that flared out stiff enough to hold their own shape, a case of costume jewellery glittering under glass, a shelf of gloves in every length from wrist to elbow. Somewhere in the back, half-hidden behind a rail of fringed shawls, hung a row of high-waisted swing skirts, checked and striped and one, at the very end, a deep forest green with a row of tiny covered buttons up the front.

She tried three things before she found the one that mattered.

The first was a red polka-dot dress, full-skirted, cinched at the waist, and it made her feel like she was wearing a decade rather than an outfit, fun, but borrowed, like she'd stepped into someone else's photograph. The second was a Victorian-inspired blouse with a high lace collar that itched faintly at her throat and made her stand up straighter without meaning to, some old muscle memory about posture kicking in from nowhere. Interesting. Not quite it.

The third was the green swing skirt, paired almost by accident with a cream blouse she found folded on a nearby shelf, its sleeves gathered soft at the wrist. She stepped into the fitting room, a proper one this time, with a low velvet stool and a mirror in a scrolled gold frame, the kind of thing that belonged in a house rather than a shopping centre, and by the time she'd fastened the last covered button, she understood what the first two outfits had been missing.

They'd been 'someone's' look. This was starting to feel like it might be hers.

She sat at the little vanity built into the corner of the fitting room, an actual vanity, with three mirrors angled to show her from every side, like the shop had been built for exactly this kind of slow, private ceremony, and that was when she noticed the box of ribbons.

It sat tucked behind a jar of hairpins, spools of velvet in a dozen colours: a black one, a burgundy one, a deep forest green that matched the skirt so precisely it seemed less like a coincidence and more like an invitation. She picked up the green spool and turned it over in her hands, and then, without any real plan, began to try to do something with her hair.

She was bad at it, at first. Genuinely, laughably bad, the ribbon slipped, the half-up style she was attempting collapsed twice, one side ended up higher than the other in a way that made her snort out loud in the empty shop. She didn't stop. There was no one to be embarrassed in front of, and something about that made her patient in a way she wasn't usually patient with herself. She tried again. She undid it and tried a different way, low instead of high, a simple tie instead of a bow, and then tried the bow again but smaller, and somewhere in the fourth or fifth attempt she stopped thinking about getting it 'right' and started just enjoying the actual doing of it, the small motions, the ribbon sliding cool against her fingers, the way her reflection changed by degrees instead of all at once.

It took her a long time to notice how long she'd been sitting there. Long enough that her legs had gone a little stiff from the low stool, long enough that the ribbon had finally settled into something she liked, not perfect, not the kind of style a professional would have made, but 'chosen', each small decision hers, arrived at by trying and failing and trying again in a mirror that answered to no one but her.

She sat back and looked at the three reflections the vanity gave her, one from the front, one from each side, like she'd been triple-exposed onto the same warm evening. The green skirt. The cream blouse. The ribbon, slightly crooked in a way she'd decided, halfway through, that she liked better than crooked-on-purpose would have looked. It wasn't the boy from the bookshop, and it wasn't quite the same person who'd found herself in Marguerite's mirror an hour ago, either. It was something new again, something that had needed the ribbon and the trying and the small failures to arrive at all.

'This is what I look like when nobody's deciding for me,' she thought, and the thought startled her a little with how simple it was, and how true.

She found a pair of flats in a box under the shelf, soft, the colour of the inside of a chestnut, nothing like heels but a world away from her scuffed trainers, and slid them on, and stood, and turned once in front of the tall mirror by the door, watching the skirt catch and settle the way the boutique skirt had, but slower now, heavier, a different kind of music.

Down the corridor, past a darkened food hall and a directory board she didn't need to check anymore, she could just make out a glow spilling from somewhere on the far side of the floor, brighter than anything she'd seen so far, throwing faint colour onto the tile like a spotlight left on for a show that hadn't started. She had a feeling, standing there in her ribbon and her borrowed green skirt, that she knew exactly what kind of shop threw light like that.

She left the ribbon in. She left the flats on. And she went to go find out.

Chapter Four: The Glamour District

The glow got brighter the closer she got, until she rounded the corner past the food hall and understood why. This wasn't just a shop, it took up the whole end of the wing, two levels of glass frontage with a spiral staircase visible through the window, and even with half its lights dimmed for the night, what remained on was enough to throw colour across the entire corridor: gold, then a deep electric blue, then a soft rose, cycling slowly through some display cycle no one had bothered to switch off.

The name across the top, in letters taller than she was, simply read 'NOVA'.

She'd never so much as looked in this window during the day. It was the kind of shop she associated with other people entirely, the ones who got dressed up for things, who had somewhere to be that justified sequins. Tonight, with the shutter rolled all the way up and unlocked, apparently for no reason she could find, the whole place felt less like a shop and more like a stage that had been waiting, patiently, for someone to wander onto it.

She stepped inside and the temperature seemed to change, though she knew it couldn't have, just the effect of all that glass and light, the racks of gowns catching every colour that passed over them and throwing it back doubled. Sequins in a deep midnight blue. A column of red so saturated it looked wet. On a rail near the back hung entirely in black, but black that moved, velvet next to satin next to something with a faint metallic thread woven through it. Each fabric black in a slightly different way, like the colour had more than one true form.

This was not a place for slow browsing, the way the vintage shop had been. This was a place that dared her to be quick, to be bold about it, to reach for the thing that caught her eye before she could talk herself out of wanting it.

She reached for a cocktail dress first, short, a deep bottle green, with a neckline cut lower than anything she'd tried on so far, and held it against herself in the mirror, and felt something in her chest give a small, surprised lurch, half nerves and half something closer to delight. Too much, maybe. Or exactly enough. She wasn't sure yet which.

But it was the gown that actually stopped her.

It hung alone on a rail near the spiral staircase, almost apart from the rest of the shop, like it had been set aside on purpose. Deep sapphire, floor length, and a train that pooled behind it on the floor like something poured rather than sewn. No sequins, no obvious sparkle, just fabric so rich it seemed to absorb the shifting light instead of reflecting it, dark and quiet and completely sure of itself.

She didn't decide to try it on. She simply found herself, several minutes later, standing in the largest fitting room she'd ever seen, zipping herself into it with hands that weren't quite steady.

It fit strangely well for something pulled at random off a rail in an empty shop at three in the morning, snug through the waist, the train sweeping the tiled floor behind her with a soft, continuous whisper unlike anything the pleated skirt or the swing skirt had made. She found a pair of drop earrings in a case by the till, unlocked like everything else tonight, small stars of glass that caught whatever light reached them and scattered it back in tiny, complete shows.

She put them on, clipping them on each lobe, they pinched in a way that felt slightly odd but oddly right. She didn't second-guess it.

Then she walked, not to the nearest mirror this time, but toward the centre of the shop, where the overhead lighting rig, some leftover fixture from a fashion show or a photo shoot, still had a single spotlight glowing, aimed down at an empty circle of floor like it was waiting for someone to finally stand in it.

She stood in it.

The light was warm and close and made everything outside its circle fall away into shadow, the racks, the staircase. For a moment there was only her and the light and the gown and the small stars at her ears, and she let herself just 'be' there, without moving, without performing for anyone, because there was, for the third time tonight, nobody at all to perform for.

She thought about the boy who had ducked into a fitting room seven hours ago to avoid a conversation about the stock count. She thought about how careful he'd always been, not dramatically unhappy, nothing that would have shown up if you'd asked him how he was doing, just a small, constant carefulness, a lifetime of choosing the safer shirt, the plainer haircut, the joke that deflected rather than revealed. She thought about how far that boy currently was, in every sense that mattered, from the person standing in this spotlight in a borrowed sapphire gown, and she found she didn't feel sad about the distance. She felt like she'd finally caught up to something that had been waiting for her the whole time.

She lifted her arms slightly, the way she had with the lavender jumper's sleeves all those floors and hours ago, and watched the fabric answer her, that same half-beat delay, grander now, weightier, the train sliding across the tile floor like it had somewhere unhurried to be. She turned once, slow, arms still lifted, and let the light catch the earrings and throw two small constellations across the nearest window.

"Okay," she said out loud, quietly, to the empty spotlight, to the otherwise dimly lit shop, to no one. "Okay."

It wasn't a big word this time either. But it meant something different than it had in the boutique. That one had been a question answered. This one was a decision confirmed, that whatever this was, whoever she'd been finding piece by piece that night, she wasn't going to be afraid of how far it went.

She stayed in the light a while longer than she meant to, in no hurry now, aware for the first time all night of a small ache in her feet from shoes that weren't hers and a night that was, by whatever clock still worked in this dead building, getting late. But there was one more place her feet wanted to take her before she let herself think about that, a soft, warm-lit counter she'd glimpsed on her way in, glass cases full of small jars and brushes, mirrors ringed in bulbs like something out of an old dressing room.

She stepped carefully out of the spotlight, gathered the train of the gown around her so it wouldn't drag through the dust by the door, and went to go find the last of it.

Chapter Five: The Finishing Touches

The counter sat in the middle of the ground floor, an island of glass and soft light in a corridor she must have walked past a thousand times without once slowing down. By day it was staffed by two women in white coats who always seemed to be misting something onto a stranger's wrist. By night it was just her, the gown trailing behind her like something borrowed from a dream she hadn't finished having, and case after case of small jars waiting to be opened.

She set the train down carefully over the back of a stool and leaned in over the glass. Lipsticks stood in rows like a spectrum someone had sorted with real care, nudes at one end, deepening through rose and berry to a red at the other end so dark it was nearly black. Eyeshadow palettes lay open under the lights, little continents of colour, shimmer catching and throwing back gold. Perfume bottles crowded a mirrored tray, cut glass and heavy stoppers, each one promising something different in small looping script she had to tilt her head to read.

She didn't reach for the boldest thing first, though the deep red tempted her. She reached for a small tube near the middle of the row, a tinted balm, sheer, the label promising 'rose quartz' in letters too delicate to be practical, and twisted it open and looked at it for a long moment before doing anything at all.

There was something about this part that felt different from everything else tonight. The jumper, the skirt, the gown, all of it had been about what she put 'on', layers she could step out of at the end of the night and leave folded over a fitting-room stool. This felt closer to the skin itself. Less like dressing up, more like coming into focus.

She leaned toward the small mirror propped against the till and drew the balm across her lips, careful, a little unsteady on the first pass, better on the second. It didn't do much, really, just a faint rose warmth, a little shine catching the light when she pressed her lips together like she'd seen women do so often. She found herself staring at the difference, at the small, exact way it made her whole face seem to settle into itself.

She tried a shimmer next, just a fingertip's worth swept along each eyelid, gold-bronze and barely-there, and when she blinked, she caught it flash in the mirror and laughed out loud, delighted, the sound of it too loud in the empty shopping centre and not something she cared to muffle.

Last was the perfume. She tested three on the little cards laid out for exactly that purpose, one too sharp, all citrus and something metallic underneath, one so sweet it made her nose wrinkle, before she found the third, a soft floral with something warmer underneath it, vanilla maybe, or sandalwood, something that smelled less like a single flower and more like a whole afternoon in a garden she hadn't been to yet. She misted it once at her wrist, the way she'd watched the counter women do it for other people a hundred times, and brought it up to breathe in, and something in her chest loosened all the way, finally, completely.

This was the part, she realized, that made the rest of it stop being separate from her. The jumper could come off. The gown could go back on its rail. But the rose balm on her lips and the gold at the corner of her eyes and the warm scent rising off her own wrist, those felt less like things she'd tried on and more like things she'd simply, finally, allowed.

She looked at her reflection in the little counter mirror for a long time. Still sat in the gown she hadn't quite worked out how to remove without help, hair still faintly kept by a green ribbon going soft at the edges, lips faintly rose, eyes catching gold whenever she moved. None of it matched, exactly. All of it, somehow, did.

That was when the lights changed.

It happened slowly at first, a bank of fluorescents overhead stuttering once, twice, then holding steady at a brightness the moonlight glow had never come close to. Somewhere far off, a metal shutter groaned upward. She felt her heart do something complicated, caught between the dawning fact of the morning shift arriving and a small, unexpected grief at the idea that the night, her night, the only one like it she'd ever had, was already closing its hand around itself.

She had maybe ten minutes, she guessed, before someone with keys found her standing at a beauty counter in a sapphire gown. She used them well. She eased herself out of the sapphire dress in the same fitting room she'd found it in, back into her own jeans and the lavender jumper she couldn't bring herself to leave behind, the ribbon staying exactly where it was because undoing it felt, suddenly, like an unnecessary cruelty. She left neat piles everywhere she'd been, folded, not abandoned, the way you'd leave a room you intended to come back to.

By the time the first members of staff started drifting in through the service corridor, tired and caffeinated and utterly uninterested in a girl slipping out near the loading bay with an oversized lavender jumper and a slightly crooked green ribbon in her hair, the shopping centre had gone back to being exactly what it was every other morning: bright, loud, unremarkable, full of people with somewhere to be.

She stood outside for a moment in the cool grey light before sunrise, letting the automatic doors sigh shut behind her, and reached up without thinking to touch the ribbon still tied in her hair.

She'd half expected, walking out, that the feeling would stay behind with the gown and the spotlight and the empty aisles, that stepping back into the ordinary world would mean stepping back into the ordinary version of herself, the one who chose safer shirts and plainer haircuts and jokes that deflected rather than revealed.

It didn't happen that way. The ribbon was still there. The rose balm was still faintly on her lips. The jumper was still soft against her arms in exactly the way it had been at nine o'clock the night before, and none of it asked to be taken off just because the doors had unlocked.

She had a shift to think about, and a stock count her manager would still want an answer for, and, somewhere down the line, an entire conversation with herself she hadn't finished having. But none of that felt like it had to happen this morning. This morning, she only had to walk to her car in a lavender jumper and a slightly crooked ribbon, carrying the small, steady certainty that whatever she'd found last night in an empty shopping centre wasn't something she'd left at the door.

It was hers now. She was taking it home.

The End