JULIAN

I had walked past it before.

Not once. Many times, in the specific and unremarkable way of a man who took the same route between the office and the car and had taken it for eleven years and had accumulated, in the peripheral and unexamined way of a person whose attention was reliably elsewhere, a working knowledge of the storefronts on the south side of the block without ever having directed his attention at any of them deliberately. The dry cleaner. The place that sold Italian ceramics and appeared, by the evidence of its unchanging window display and its consistently empty interior, to be conducting its retail operation as...