Liam sat on the steps outside his building.
The cold had teeth tonight, the kind that got into a jacket through the seams instead of just sitting on top of it.
His breath came out in short pale clouds and dissolved before he could really look at them.
A few cars sat parked along the curb, frost already starting to bloom faint and thin across their windshields.
Across the road, one window glowed blue and flickering, someone's TV, someone's ordinary night.
He had his elbows on his knees, hands loosely linked, and he wasn't looking at anything in particular.
The wind came down the street in short gusts, pushing a torn flyer along the gutter until it caught against a tire and stopped.
He'd been out there twenty minutes, maybe more.
Long enough that his hands had gone stiff and he hadn't bothered to put them in his pockets.
He let the evening replay itself without asking permission, the way it kept doing whether he wanted it to or not.
