The number follows me

The silver token made the back of my neck sting. Not because it proved anything clean and simple, but because it made the pattern feel deliberate. Felix does not seem to need my permission to rearrange the world. He only needs a depot number and enough tired people to stop asking who changed the record.

I wanted Sanna to explain the chain faster, to give me the neat answer I could carry to the hearing without having to think too hard. She kept working on the cable instead. Her refusal to take payment annoyed me in a way I almost liked. She was not performing courage for me. She was simply refusing to be bought, and that made her inconveniently difficult to distrust.

The strongest thought I kept trying to bury was this: if the same chain can move patients, drivers, and altered records, then it can move me too. Not with ropes, probably. With paperwork. With a replacement van, a job, a believable reason to be elsewhere. I have spent years making other people’s final wishes real while using them as doors out of my own life. Now I wonder whether someone built a door for me and made it look like coincidence.

My mother will hear the news eventually, probably before I decide how she should hear it. I still have not called. I still want her to ask me to come home, mostly because being asked would let me refuse. If she does not ask, I will have to admit that I chose the distance as much as anything Felix chose for me.