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A faint click sounded from the alley—a camera, a shutter, a memory being taken. The teenager had darted forward, phone extended, filming the poster. On the screen the poster’s image warped: a shadow in the doorway that had not been there a heartbeat before. A man. The crowd around the screen shifted; someone cursed. Clemence peered through the cracked windshield and glimpsed the faintest shape near the theater’s side entrance—someone who might have been a trick of shadow, might have been a man leaning on a cane, or might have been the last frame of an old life.

“Why here, of all places?” she asked.

They sat in the rain and watched the old marquee. People passed: a couple in matching scarves, a woman hauling groceries, a teenager with headphones. None glanced up. Time moved on conspiringly normal.