The door opened and Sherry was standing in it.
Her hair had grown out a little, enough that it caught at her cheekbones when the alley air moved.
Four days since I'd watched her get dressed in her own room with the sun coming through the window, and it felt like something that had happened to a different body in a different city.
She didn't hug me.
She came into me. Forehead against my collarbone, hands finding the back of my shirt, the whole of her weight arriving at once as if the doorframe had been the only thing holding her up and she had decided to stop using it.
I got my arms around her. The smell of her hair reached me before anything else — clean sweat, dust, the faint soap of whatever water they'd found.
"Don't worry." I said it into the space above her ear. "He's dead."
