Reflections Remember You

Her days were so alike that sometimes Mia felt that if someone shuffled them around, she would never notice the difference.

The alarm rang at six in the morning. A shower. Black coffee without sugar. The subway, where people stood far too close to one another and still managed to remain endlessly alone. Then came the office on the third floor of an old business center, squeezed between a travel agency and an appliance store.

A modest sign hung on the door:

Fortuna Agency of Probabilistic Solutions.

To a casual visitor, it sounded like just another consulting firm. To its regular clients, it was a place where one could buy luck.

Not abstract luck. Not fairy-tale luck. Not the kind people toasted to at holiday tables. Real luck. Luck drawn up in a contract, paid by invoice, and processed through accounting.

A successful job interview. A parking space opening at exactly the right moment. A call from the person you needed most. A coincidence that looked natural but came with a price.

Mia had worked as the agency’s accountant for five years. She knew the rates, the commissions, the seasonal discounts, and the tax risks. She knew how much a “chance encounter” cost and what price people paid for a “second chance.” But she almost never wondered what happened to them after the payment went through.

That was none of her business.

Numbers were more honest than people. At least they did not pretend to mean something other than what they were.

That evening, she stayed later than usual. She closed the quarterly report, checked the payment for a strange order marked “probabilistic alteration of appearance,” and only then noticed that darkness had long since fallen beyond the windows.

A fine, stubborn, urban rain was falling outside. The kind that did not wash the dirt away, but merely made it more visible.

She did not feel like going home. Her apartment was waiting for her with an unwashed mug, the cold light of the kitchen, and a series she turned on not because she watched it, but because silence sometimes sounded too loud.

Mia turned toward the embankment and went into a small café by the water. She ordered a lavender raf, sat by the window, and for the first time that day allowed herself to do nothing.

Beyond the glass, the river was black and smooth. The streetlights stretched across its surface in long, trembling lines. Cars passed somewhere behind her, but here, by the water, the city seemed muted, as if someone had turned down its volume.

Mia stared out of the window without thinking.

And then the reflection changed.

At first she thought it was only a trick of the light. The water trembled, and the familiar silhouettes of buildings became taller, thinner, stranger. Between the ordinary houses rose towers that did not exist on the shore. Narrow, dark towers, like needles of wet glass. They reached into the low clouds, where their sharp spires dissolved.

Mia slowly straightened.

In the reflection, people were walking along the embankment.

On the real embankment, there was no one.

The figures moved beside the water: silent, elongated, wrapped in long coats, their faces impossible to make out. They did not look at Mia. And yet she suddenly felt that they knew about her.

She blinked.

The river became ordinary again.

No towers. No strange silhouettes. Only rain, streetlights, and black water.

For several seconds Mia sat motionless, clutching her cooling cup. Then she forced herself to smile.

Exhaustion. Overwork. Too many numbers, too little sleep.

She finished her coffee, got up, and went outside.

Behind her, on the surface of the river, the impossible city appeared once more for a fleeting moment.

And in one of its dark windows, someone opened their eyes.