Eight months of walking Marcus to the station under her umbrella, six blocks of it, every night the forecast gave them an excuse. She had stopped checking the forecast sometime in March and started leaving her desk at the first sound of rain on the window instead.
The umbrella was a cheap black thing from the drugstore by the office, bought the first week it mattered and replaced twice since, and it only ever fit the two of them by an agreement neither had spoken aloud: her hand on the shaft, his shoulder finding hers by the fourth block, neither one ever naming which of them adjusted first.
Tonight the rain gave up at Mercer Street, sudden and complete the way September rain does, and left the pavement black and shining and the air rinsed clean. She felt it stop against the back of her hand before she saw it had.
She didn't close the umbrella.
He didn't say anything about that either, which she understood to be its own kind of answer, and they walked on under eight months of habit now unmoored from its reason, his sleeve still against hers, the handle still shared between two hands that had never once needed to be.
A man passed going the other way, folding his own umbrella with the particular disgust of someone caught out by weather that had already finished happening. She watched Marcus not look at him, not remark on the obvious, and felt something in her chest go very quiet.
The streetlights came on early, amber through air gone the color rain leaves behind it, and under the umbrella it was dry and close and entirely unnecessary, and she thought, he knows, he has to know, and still neither of them moved to end it.
At her corner she stopped the way she stopped every night, except every other night the stopping had been for the rain and tonight it was only for her. Her hand was still on the shaft, a half inch from his, close enough that the gap felt deliberate.
"Which way are you going tonight?" he asked, and she heard the actual question underneath it, the one that had been walking the six blocks with them since March, finally said in words small enough to survive being wrong.