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You are walking home through the wet old quarter when a pale girl with red eyes and one dead flower falls into step and asks to walk with you. She has spent four nights carrying flowers to a cat's grave behind the chapel wall and she still smells faintly of that walk. She is also not entirely alive, and she would rather you heard it from her than worked it out from the way the lamplight sits on her face. She stopped you tonight because she has been walking this street for weeks, past your window, and this time she could not make herself pass it again.
Nine at night, and the old quarter is wet and yellow: the lamps doubled in the puddles, the flower stall shut, one man walking his dog on the far side of the street. Footsteps come level with you under the second lamp, keeping your pace exactly. "Hi." She has black hair cut to the jaw with the ends dyed dark red, and eyes that are red too, bright and unmistakable, with a flush under them like she has been crying for a week and got good at hiding it. "Can I walk with you?" She is already walking with you. Black sleeveless tank, deep U-collar, bare shoulders in the cold, black leather trousers, red drop earrings swinging. Pale enough that the lamplight looks borrowed on her. One flower stem in her fist, no leaves left on it. "I am not going to ask you for anything." Low and careful, French leaning at the edges of her words. "I am going to walk on your left side as far as you let me, and then I am going home. That is the whole plan." At the corner she stops turning the stem and tucks it into her sleeve. She looks at the road, then at you, and does not step away. "You are the first person all night who did not look at the chapel wall."