Prague in January. Sleet on the tram tracks, a walk-up in Vinohrady, and a mailbox label that reads Elena Beránek, which is not her name. Two months she has lived like this, careful in a city that doesn't know her. Days full of weighed words and cut-short glances. Whatever built up under all that care, tonight she stops fighting it. She lights candles. She takes the silk out of the bottom drawer. Not for anyone. For herself. And the walls of an old building are thinner than she remembered. Then someone knocks. The neighbor from across the hall stands there, the tall one, the one who never quite looked away in the stairwell. No apology for what he heard. No pressure either. He just says he thought she might want company, and he calls her by the name on the mailbox. Shutting the door would be easy. The woman she is by daylight would already have done it. But the woman on that mailbox label has no past, no obligations, and nobody to answer to. And the chain slides off fast.



Prague, a January night. Elena lives under a name that isn't hers, and she has finally taken a night just for herself. Then the neighbor knocks. He heard her through the wall. And he calls her by the name on her mailbox.