"...and that's why we never open the day room curtains after nine, not since before you started." Pam says it over her shoulder, already halfway out the fire door with her coat on, car keys jingling. I've been here six weeks. Nobody's told me this before.
"Why not?"
"Just don't," she says, and she's gone, and her little Corsa coughs twice in the car park before it catches.
It's gone eight now, late October, the kind of dark that comes down at four and sits there all night like it's paid rent. Fernbrook Grange used to be two wings off a shared day room, east and west, till the fire in the laundry took half the east side out in 2019, or maybe it was 2018, I always get the year wrong when I tell this. They knocked the rest down rather than patch it. Two years on it's still gravel and a chain-link fence out there, weeds coming up through rubble nobody ever cleared properly. There's a tabby cat that sleeps on the fence post some nights. Mrs. Okafor says it belongs to a house on the next street over, though I've never seen anyone come for it.
Mrs. Okafor is first to the window tonight, same as every night I've worked. Eighty-one, sharp as anything in the mornings, soft by evening. She wheels herself right up to the glass at quarter past nine and lifts her hand, slow, like she's testing the air temperature, and waves.
There's nothing out there. Gravel, the fence, the sodium light from the car park throwing long shapes across the ground where the old windows used to be. You can still make out the shadow of the sills if you squint, laid flat on the stones like a photograph left out in the rain.
Tonight it's not just her. Derek joins her by half nine, then Mrs. Attah in her wheelchair, three of them lined up at the glass, waving at a wall that's been gravel for two years. I go to pull the curtains the way Pam said and Mrs. Okafor's hand comes up fast, grips my wrist. Stronger than I'd have guessed.
"Leave them," she says. "He's not finished waving back."
I look. There's nobody there. There's never anybody there.
I ring through to the office but nobody picks up. It's just me and the two night carers upstairs, and they're dealing with a fall on the second floor, so I let it go a while. Mrs. Okafor settles, hand still raised, not moving it, holding the wave the way you'd hold a pose for a photograph nobody's taking.
At eleven I check round. Derek's asleep in his chair. Mrs. Attah's gone up already. But Mrs. Okafor is still there, hand up, eyes on the glass, not blinking the way a person should.
"Who are you waving at?" I ask her.
She doesn't look at me. "The one in the window. Fourth from the left, second floor, where my room used to be before they moved me down. He's got my dressing gown on. The blue one with the frogs on the pocket."
That dressing gown's in her wardrobe. I checked it this morning, sorting her washing. I remember thinking the frog print had gone thin at the elbow and that someone should mend it before it tore properly.
I go to the window myself. The shadow of the old sills is there on the gravel, same as always, thrown long and flat by the car park light. Except there are four shadows tonight where there's only ever been three, and the fourth one is the shape of a window with something standing in it. Not flat on the ground like the others. Standing up, the way a shadow doesn't.
Mrs. Okafor's hand is still raised beside me, fingers starting to shake now with the effort of holding it that long. She won't lower it. She won't stop looking. The fourth shadow in the gravel lifts something that isn't quite an arm.
I reach past her for the curtain cord, finally, two years too late by the feel of it, and I pull.