They met in the hallway outside his room. She was leaving 14 and he was arriving at 16, and for a moment they were both in the corridor with their coats still on, neither one inside yet.
"Smells like Thursday," she said.
He looked confused.
"Meatloaf," she explained. "It's always meatloaf on Thursdays."
That was the first time. After that it was most Thursdays, sometimes Tuesdays. She visited her mother. He visited his wife. The rooms were twelve feet apart, separated by a fire extinguisher and a hand sanitizer dispenser and a framed print of a covered bridge that someone must have chosen on purpose but that nobody had ever looked at on purpose.
They learned each other's schedules without discussing them. If she was early she'd slow down in the parking lot. If he was late he'd hear her laughing through the wall — she was always laughing with her mother, which he admired and resented equally because laughing was no longer available to him in room 16.
The hallway conversations were always short. Weather, parking, whether the elevator was working again. Once he told her the vending machine had been restocked and she said "the peanut butter crackers?" and he said "the peanut butter crackers" and she said "thank God" and that was the longest exchange they'd had in four months.
Her mother knew about him. "Your hallway friend," she called him, and sometimes when he walked past she'd wave through the open door. He waved back. He never stopped. She never asked him to.
In room 16, he sat with a woman who'd been sitting for three years. He read to her from the newspaper. He told her about the garden. He held her hand, which was warm and did not hold back, and he stayed exactly ninety minutes because that was how long he could do it before the warmth of her hand became a weight that pressed on something he couldn't name.
Then he'd step into the hallway and the hallway would be cooler and he'd breathe.
In February he wasn't there for two Thursdays. She noticed because the hallway felt longer without him in it, which was strange since they never stood in it for more than a minute.
On the third Thursday she came out of room 14 and he was standing outside room 16. The door was closed. A new nameplate was on it — someone else's name, someone she didn't know. He was looking at the covered bridge print between the fire extinguisher and the hand sanitizer.
"I never noticed the bridge," he said.
"Neither did I."
They stood there. She didn't ask about room 16. He didn't explain. Her mother called from 14: "Is that your hallway friend?"
"Yes," she called back.
"Tell him the meatloaf's better this week."
He almost laughed. Not quite, but the shape of it was there — the breath, the slight lift. She hadn't heard that from him before.
"It's not," she said. "The meatloaf is never better."
"I know," he said.
They looked at the bridge. Neither of them had been to Vermont. The hallway smelled like Thursday and they were both still in it, coats on, not inside anywhere, which turned out to be the only place they'd ever needed to be.