HE SEES HER IN THE morning, during his shift. She’s at the desk with the other girl, and her face is a face he knows, but he can’t say why. It’s the feeling of seeing someone in a photograph and then again, in another, wearing different clothes, their body in a new position, but still that thing that lights up about them, that says SAME SAME SAME. He watches her as he cleans the glass, when he walks past her on his way to lunch, when he comes back. He’s studied so many women’s faces, hands, teeth, hair, elbows, eyelashes. The shape of their jaws and the curves of their ears and the swish of their ponytails and the dots of freckles on their noses and cheeks and arms. He stores her away in his brain, her dark brown hair and her brown eyes the color of chocolate. Her pale skin and the arches of her eyebrows.

After he clocks out, he waits around for a chance to look at her up close, but she doesn’t come into the back hall, where all of the other women keep their things. He knows this will continue to bother him until he sorts it out, the itch of an understanding that’s being withheld. His fingers curl into a fist.