The dead always looked peaceful at three in the morning. That was the cruelest trick about the night shift—how the worst hours produced the quietest bodies. Elena Vasquez stripped off her gloves in the staff bathroom of Saint-Martin Hospital, watching the latex peel away from her brown skin like a second self she could simply discard. The fluorescent light above the mirror buzzed and flickered, and in its intermittent glow she looked like a woman being assembled and disassembled in rapid sequence.
She had lost a patient tonight. Mr. Fournier, seventy-eight, cardiac arrest, bed four. He had come in clutching his left arm and smiling apologetically, as though his dying were an imposition on everyone's schedule. She had worked on him for forty-two minutes. She knew, by minute thirty, that it was over. The last twelve minutes were for her, not for him—a private negotiation with a universe that did not negotiate.
She turned off the tap, dried her hands, and pressed her forehead against the cold tile wall. Somewhere behind her eyes, a headache was building like weather.
"Elena."
She turned. Sophie, the head nurse, was leaning in the doorway with a paper cup of vending machine coffee. She held it out like an offering to a reluctant god.
"You did everything right," Sophie said.
"I know."
"Then stop looking like you didn't."
Elena took the coffee. It was terrible—burnt and thin and the precise temperature of human disappointment. She drank it anyway, in three long swallows, because some rituals mattered more than taste.
"Go home," Sophie said. "Your shift ended twenty minutes ago."
"I had charting."
"You had avoiding." Sophie was from Marseille and had the southern French talent for brutal directness delivered with warmth. "Go home, Elena. Sleep. The dead will keep."
* * *
The walk home took eleven minutes. Elena had counted, because counting was what she did when her mind needed a leash. Eleven minutes from the staff exit of Saint-Martin to the front door of 34 Rue des Lilas, a narrow five-story building in the 11th arrondissement with a courtyard that smelled of jasmine in summer and wet stone in winter. It was February now, so it smelled of wet stone and something faintly metallic, like old keys.
She let herself in through the main entrance, crossed the courtyard, and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. Her apartment was 4B. She had lived here for two years, since the separation from Marc—the real Marc, the husband Marc, not the building's various inhabitants she nodded to in passing. She had kept the apartment. He had kept the house in Vincennes. A clean division of assets, the lawyers had said. As though a marriage could be divided cleanly, like a cell.
She unlocked her door, stepped inside, and leaned against it in the dark. The apartment was small: a living room with a kitchen nook, a bedroom, a bathroom barely large enough to contain her. She liked it. After the house in Vincennes with its extra rooms that collected silence like dust, she liked that this apartment left no space for absence to accumulate.
She kicked off her shoes, padded to the bedroom, and lay down on top of the duvet in her scrubs. She should shower. She should eat something. She should do any of the maintenance tasks that a body required to continue being a body.
Instead, she lay still, and listened.
There it was. Through the wall to her left—the wall she shared with apartment 4A—came a sound that had become as familiar to her as her own breathing. The rhythmic thud of something heavy and soft being worked against a surface. The faint, percussive impact of a palm against dough. And beneath it, almost sub-audible, a man's voice, humming.
Her neighbor. The baker.
She didn't know his name. She knew his schedule: awake by two-thirty, in his kitchen by three, gone by three-forty-five. She knew his sounds: the dough, the humming, the brief clatter of tools being gathered, the closing of a door. She knew that he listened to something while he worked—radio or podcast, she couldn't tell—because sometimes the humming would stop and she'd hear the muffled ghost of another voice through the plaster.
She had never seen him clearly. Once, on the staircase, she had passed a tall shape in the pre-dawn dark—broad shoulders, a canvas bag, the smell of flour and something warm like cinnamon. He had said "Bonsoir" in a low voice, and she had said "Bonsoir" back, and they had continued in opposite directions, two ships signaling in fog.
Now she lay in her bed and listened to him knead dough through the wall, and the sound was the most comforting thing she had experienced in twelve hours. The steady rhythm of it. The certainty. Mr. Fournier was dead, and the world was arbitrary and full of grief, but on the other side of this wall, a man was making bread, and the bread would rise, and people would eat it in the morning, and the morning would come regardless.
She pressed her hand flat against the wall. The plaster was cool and slightly rough beneath her palm. Through it, she could feel the faintest vibration—the ghost of his labor, transmitted through stone and lathe.
She closed her eyes.
She slept.
* * *
Damien Marchetti did not know that a woman was sleeping with her hand against his wall. He knew very little about his neighbor in 4B, except that she worked at the hospital—he had seen scrubs through the peephole once—and that she came home between two and three in the morning, which was precisely when he was waking up.
He knew this because he heard her. The click of her lock, the soft fall of her shoes. Sometimes a long exhale that seemed to carry the weight of a whole life. He had constructed, from these fragments, the image of a woman who was very tired and possibly very sad, though he knew that projection was the art of the lonely, and he was both an artist and a practitioner.
Now he shaped the levain for tomorrow's bread. His mother's recipe—or rather, his mother's mother's recipe, carried from Naples to Paris in the 1960s inside a woman's memory because the family had not been the kind to write things down. His hands moved through the dough with the unconscious authority of twenty years' repetition. Fold, turn, press. Fold, turn, press. The dough was warm and alive beneath his palms, a colony of yeast and flour and water undergoing the slow alchemy that turned raw ingredients into sustenance.
His kitchen was small but organized with the precision of a man who had spent his adult life in professional kitchens. Every tool had a place. Every surface was clean. The only disorder in the room was Damien himself—barefoot, wearing boxer shorts and an old t-shirt from a music festival he barely remembered attending, his dark hair uncombed and his jaw shadowed with stubble.
He finished shaping the levain, covered it with a damp cloth, and set it on the counter. Then he began preparing the brioche dough for the morning's production. The butter had been softening for an hour—he could tell by its sheen that it was ready, and he experienced the small private satisfaction of a man whose relationship with butter bordered on the telepathic.
The bakery opened at seven. He needed to be there by four to start the ovens. The croissants would take the longest—three hours of lamination and proofing—and the pain au chocolat needed to be in the display case by six-thirty, when the first regulars began to appear. Madame Leclerc, who came every day for a single financier and stayed for twenty minutes to discuss the weather. Thomas, the office worker who ordered the same ham-and-cheese croissant and always looked as though he were committing a small, delicious crime.
His phone buzzed on the counter. He wiped his hands on his shirt and picked it up.
A text from his sister, Céline: Papa's asking about the accounts again. Can you call him this week?
He set the phone down without responding. The accounts. The debts. His mother's bakery—now his bakery, or what remained of it—carried forty thousand euros in debt, accumulated over three years of declining revenue and one catastrophic oven replacement. His father, who had never understood the business and had understood his wife's passion for it even less, had opinions about what should be done. These opinions invariably involved selling.
Damien did not intend to sell. The bakery was the last living piece of his mother, more so than photographs or jewelry or the stories his family told about her at dinners. Those were representations. The bakery was continuation. Every morning, when he slid the first baguettes into the oven and the shop filled with the same smell that had defined his childhood, she was present in the most material way a dead person could be.
He set aside the brioche and washed his hands. Through the wall, he thought he heard something—a shift, a settling, the sound of someone turning in bed. His neighbor. The tired woman from the hospital.
He wondered, briefly, what it was like to spend your nights trying to keep people alive. His own work was simpler: he made things that gave people small moments of pleasure. A perfect croissant. A loaf of bread with a crust that sang when you pressed it. Nobody's life depended on his brioche, and he found comfort in the modesty of that.
He gathered his tools—his bag, his jacket, his keys—and moved toward the door. As he passed the shared wall, he paused. It was a habit he had developed without intending to. A brief pause, a moment of something that was not quite attention and not quite prayer, directed at the woman on the other side.
He left the apartment, pulling the door closed gently behind him.
The stairwell was dark. He descended by feel, one hand on the banister, and stepped out into the courtyard where the February air hit him like a glass of cold water. Above, in apartment 4B, Elena slept with her hand against the wall where moments ago a man had paused, unknowing, on the other side.
Two people, separated by ten centimeters of plaster, moving in opposite directions through the same hours.
The night held them both, and said nothing.