Thirty-Nine

The man in the grey coat is not here. He is always here. He is the sort of fact a morning is built on, and the morning, today, is missing one. Helen tells herself the obvious things. People take days off. People get other trains. She tells herself these things all the way into the city, and they do not take, because she has also noticed that nobody else has noticed, that the carriage has closed over his absence like water, and that she appears to be the only person on the 7:14 who remembers the grey coat was ever there at all.