Leyre knocked.

Three times. Nothing else.

Hugo opened the door.

She was carrying coffee. Two cups with lids, from a place Hugo didn’t know the name of. She set them on the table the way someone sets things down when they’ve been doing it a long time and they know where everything goes.

“Sit down,” Hugo said.

“I am sitting.”

She sat on the sofa. The same spot as always.

Hugo sat across from her.

The paper on the table between them. Leyre didn’t look at it. He did. Then stopped, because she wasn’t, and that meant something.

“The building doesn’t negotiate,” Leyre said.

“I know.”

“But I do.”

Hugo waited.

Leyre picked up the coffee. Held it in both hands, the way Naia used to. The gesture was too familiar and for a moment he didn’t know if that was reassuring or something else.

“Signing isn’t surrender,” she said. “It’s a starting point. You can set conditions. Parameters. The adjustment has room.”

“What kind of room?”

“Enough that it’s yours.”

Leyre leaned slightly forward.

“Think about it. You’ve spent months not sleeping well. Months not knowing if what you remember is real.” A pause. “The building isn’t asking you to stop being you. It’s asking you to stop being at war with the place where you live.”

Hugo didn’t answer.

“People sign things every day,” said Leyre. “Mortgages. Contracts. And they don’t think they’re surrendering. They think they’re choosing.”

“This isn’t a mortgage.”

“No,” she admitted. “But the principle is the same.”

That was the worst of everything she said.

That she was right.

Hugo looked at the paper.

“Did Damián try this?”

Leyre paused.

Not the pause of someone searching for words. The pause of someone who has the words and is deciding whether to give them.

“Damián didn’t ask.”

“Why not?”

“Because Damián was here before I was.”

Hugo sat with that.

“What happens to Marcos?”

Leyre looked at him.

“2A?”

“He’s been there three weeks. He’s already not sleeping right. Already hearing things.”

“Marcos hasn’t received anything yet.”

“When will he?”

Leyre put her cup on the table.

“When the building considers the previous adjustment sufficiently consolidated to begin the next.”

He was the previous one.

“If I sign,” Hugo said, “does Marcos stay out of it?”

Leyre looked at him. Not the practiced warmth from the early weeks. Something more direct.

“If you sign, your process ends. What happens afterward with other units isn’t up to you.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have.”

---

Leyre left twenty minutes later.

Hugo went to the window.

He watched her cross the street. Open the door of a car that was already moving. Get in without the car slowing down. Without the driver seeming to notice her.

The car kept going.

Hugo stayed at the window.

He thought: nobody gets into a moving car. Not like that. Not that naturally.

Then he thought: maybe she’d been doing it long enough that it felt natural.

Then he thought that was exactly what would happen to him.

On the table was something Leyre had left behind. Not the coffee. A folded sheet. Hugo opened it. Adjustment Proposal — Applicable Conditions — File 3B. A list of options with checkboxes. Employment continuity: ✓. Recent memory retention: ✓. Maintenance of existing relationships: Under review.

Leyre had said he could define the conditions.

The boxes were already checked.