It was eleven fifty-two when the train stopped at Sesto San Giovanni. The loudspeaker said technical fault, and ten minutes later it said it again, and after twenty minutes nothing more. I was sitting by the window, across from me a woman dressed in black, beside me two Indian girls talking quietly about an exam. I had finished my shift at eleven at piazzale Loreto, eleven years of signing forms at the municipal burial service. Four stops from home.

I had already mapped out the sequence. Two minutes to take off my stockings, eight for the shower, ten to put on my cream, twelve to get into bed, alarm at six fifteen. I open my phone. I close it. I open my phone. I close it. The woman across from me wipes her nose with a white handkerchief, as though she has been crying not long before. I look out, on platform three nothing is moving anymore, and the station's illuminated board says MILANO CENTRALE in orange, and the orange does not change.

After half an hour the driver speaks again. «Person on the tracks». Person. The word suspended, set down on top of the carriage the way you set something on a shelf. Nobody breathes. One of the Indian girls closes her notebook and says something in her language that I don't understand but think I can guess. The woman in black takes another handkerchief from her bag and starts again.

I pull from my coat pocket a bag of mint sweets left over from the afternoon and offer them. She takes one. She says thank you, and then she says «you're young». I am not young. I am forty. I don't say so.

The reflection of my face in the glass still catches me off guard. I look younger than I thought I was, and I realize I don't quite know how young I thought I was. I hadn't looked at my face this way in a stretch of time I couldn't put a date to.

I think about Marco, my husband, who at this hour is sleeping face down with his hand under the pillow, and I think he has never noticed whether I come home at eleven thirty or at twenty past one. I think about Adelina, the basil plant on the balcony that I started calling by a name because I have no children and never wanted any. I think about my department head, Riccardo, who told me two weeks ago «you sign more than anyone, signora, have you thought about a promotion?» and I said fine, and then never put in the request. Riccardo's words come back to me as though he spoke them five minutes ago. I think that perhaps this is the first time in eleven years that what he said has actually reached me.

My sister Stefania comes back to me too, who lives in Como and who calls on Thursdays at eight in the evening. Tonight is Friday. Stefania does not call on Fridays. My father died in July 2017 and I always picture him with my mother three steps behind, and when I phone her she always asks whether I've eaten, and I always say yes even when I haven't eaten, and she says good. The rain starts, lightly. The Indian girls close their notebook. One of them says something that I have the sense means we've arrived, but we haven't arrived. We are still.

At twelve forty-three I lift my finger from the clock on my phone. I don't look at it again. I stay still. I don't write to anyone. I don't call. I don't send the message already typed, «train stopped, technical problem, running late», which had been sitting in drafts for twenty minutes. I don't send it.

I allowed myself, without saying so to myself, not to account for the time. I hadn't done it since university. Perhaps I had never done it. My nights have always had a direction, even the empty ones. Not tonight. Tonight the carriage is still, outside the rain starts lightly, inside there are seven of us sitting and looking at each other without quite looking, and no one is waiting for us except sleep, and sleep is waiting for all of us.

At one fifty-four the train moves again. The woman in black hands me back the bag of sweets, full, she has not taken a single one after the first. I take it back. She looks out, I look at her, we smile inside the same silence. We say nothing. The Indian girls got off at Greco-Pirelli, they waved with their palms open against the window, one of them left a pencil on the small table.

I reach Greco-Pirelli at one fifty-seven. Centrale at one fifty-nine. The underground has been stopped for an hour. I take a taxi. I get home at two twenty-eight. Marco didn't notice.

I take a longer shower than usual. I turn on the water and listen to its sound. I think that the boy on the tracks had a name I will read in the papers tomorrow, and that no one said who he was, and that the seven of us in the carriage spent three hours inside his death without knowing it.

I look at the bathroom clock. It is a round white clock with black numbers. For the first time I don't read it. I see the hands. I don't read the time. I take off my towel. I go to bed.