Micah keeps a rule: never start at the beginning. In a museum archive room, she turns a train ticket stub over and over, as if rotating it could rewind time. The scene she tells herself first is the aftermath--Noor’s message blinking on her phone, the single sentence that made her knees buckle. Only later does she allow the earlier scene in: a bright afternoon, too ordinary to seem important then. Noor offers the a train ticket stub. Micah declines. The refusal is polite, even gentle, which is what makes it unforgivable now. The passage loops back to the present with her hand raised to knock, but the reader already knows the knock will not undo what her chosen order has delayed admitting.