Five minutes outside. One conversation that should have stayed casual. It didn’t.

She picked up a cigarette she didn't know how to smoke because it was the closest she could get to understanding someone who left. He sat down next to her and didn't say a word. Some people enter your life through a door. He entered through a silence.

She shows up somewhere she shouldn't be, wearing something she shouldn't be wearing, having left someone she shouldn't have left. He doesn't send her back.

Everything tastes different since he quit. Coffee. Street food. Rain. Her. Especially her.

The man who spent a year hiding in smoke finally steps into the light. But first, he has to sit across from the woman who put him there — and tell her why he's not coming back.

She asked for a cigarette. She got something else entirely. Fourteen floors up, no names, no questions.

Three months of an empty rooftop. Then someone shows up with a camera instead of a cigarette, and the ugly concrete has never looked like this before.