The Park Cleaners sign crackled to life just as the rain started, a fizzing neon OPEN that glowed apricot against the slicked sidewalks. June always turned it on first. It felt like lighting a candle in a window, a small promise to the street that somebody inside was still awake and folding. Steam floated silver above the press. The air smelled like starch and citrus solvent and the damp paper of claim tickets. June snapped a wire hanger straight with a practised twist and hooked it through a dress shirt collar, the kind with stiff points that bit her fingers a little. Somewhere in the back, the boiler thumped and sent a soft tremor through the racks. Her mum was at the counter, tapping numbers into the old register with the confidence of a pianist. The drawer rang open like a bell. Mrs Park’s hair was up with a pencil stuck through it, and she had the same look she wore when she was measuring hems—eyebrows slightly pinched in concentration, one finger pressed to the machine’s worn keys, exacting and quick. ‘You’ve got the closing shift,’ her mum said without looking up. ‘I’ll finish the ledger, then run the deposit.’ ‘I know,’ June said. She hooked the dressed shirt onto a rolling rack and tapped the claim tag to make sure it was secure. ‘I like closing.’ It was true. The hours after dinner were quieter, the radio played songs she could hum along to, and the objects were less talkative then, their whispers softened by the rain. Whispers wasn’t the right word. Some days it was more like static, the fuzzed edge of radio distress when the station didn’t quite land. Other days it was as sharp as somebody clearing their throat in the next aisle. Even wrapped in plastic and paper and starch, things remembered. If she pressed her palm to a jacket and closed her eyes, the shop around her would blur and a bit of the jacket’s past might push up from wherever objects keep their breath. She had learnt not to touch with her palms unless she wanted to be pulled along. The older she got, the more it felt like the world had started a group chat and her contact info had been added without permission. Most inanimate chatter was harmless, gossip about coat hooks and bus benches, frayed edges showing off. Halmeoni used to call it the heart of things. *Your fingers wake it up,* she’d said once, pressing June’s hands between her own warm palms. *The things know you’re listening.* The bell over the door jingled and Mr Patel hurried in, trailing the smell of wet umbrellas and the hopeful energy of someone trying to beat the parking metre. He grinned like a startled moon when he saw June. ‘Ah, my saviour. Did you remove the espresso stain?’ He snapped his fingers toward the suit bag she had set aside for him. ‘Like it was never there,’ June said. She slid the bag over to him and he peered inside, satisfied. ‘To never meeting white shirts and coffee again,’ he said, and raised an invisible mug. ‘Your mother is an artist.’ ‘Tell her,’ June said. ‘She won’t take it from me.’ She rang him up—cash, exact change, a promise to bring his winter coat before the first cold—and waved at his retreating back sniffing for rain like a rabbit. The shop quieted again. The DJ on the tiny radio behind the counter was murmuring about a late-night call-in show and a contest for tickets to some opening at the art museum. The clock over the door ticked closer to eight. June hung a row of pressed trousers with a satisfying clack, her mind forming triangles with the creases, her thumbs smoothing down threads the way her mum did, chasing wrinkles out of air. The bell jingled again, a lighter sound. A courier in a clear plastic poncho slid a roll of fresh garments onto the intake bar, their plastic covers shining like fish skin. He thumbed the rain off his eyelashes. ‘Four for Monday,’ he said. ‘And this one’s a rush. Ticket’s on it.’ June signed the clipboard, thanked him, wiped the counter where he had dripped—she was incapable of seeing a wet ring form and not blotting it—and turned to the roll. Shirt, blazer, dress with a beaded hem, and then: a denim jacket faded almost to fog, the blue bleached by sun and salt. Swallows were stitched in black thread, looping over the left pocket as though somebody had seen them once, mid-arc, and couldn’t forget them. A rectangle of red paper hung from the zip: R.B., 8179, RUSH, in tidy block letters. The jacket didn’t whisper. It thrummed. It was a low hum June felt in her wrists the second she reached for the hanger. It travelled up her bones, bright as the neon sign. She swallowed and looked toward the office door where her mum was humming to herself, counting receipts. June touched the jacket again, just her fingertips this time. The hum tickled the pads of her fingers like the static when you pull a jumper over your head. ‘Okay,’ she murmured, to herself or the jacket or the idea of listening. ‘Okay.’ June slid the jacket off the bar and onto the counter. She lifted the flap of the left pocket. Inside was a dollar in coins and a Polaroid, the white border softened by years of being uncarefully held. The photograph showed the front of Park Cleaners at night, the neon sign burning exactly as it did now, OPEN against the January darkness. There were no people in the frame. The pavement shone as if it had just been rinsed by rain. As soon as she touched the tip of a finger to the glossy surface, the static came into focus. A voice, not male or female, not anything human exactly, but shaped like words leaning towards her. ‘Third shelf,’ it said, as if the words had been kept warm at the back of a throat. ‘Velvet bag. Eight seventeen.’ June froze. The feeling wasn’t unfamiliar. The letter opener once sang a snippet of a lullaby when she used it to slice open a bill. The lost earring in the coin dish had once shown her a brief stretch of laughter, a pavement conversation between girls with matching backpacks. But this—this was specific. The voice seemed to know where she was standing, what shelves they kept, what time the clock was turning toward. ‘June?’ her mum called, half a warning, half a question, hearing the silence stretch past the length of one hanger and into two. ‘Everything okay?’ ‘Fine!’ June called back, lifting her hands as if she could show her empty palms through the wall. She slid the Polaroid back into the pocket. Then she went stiff-haired and arrow-quiet and walked into the pressing room. The third shelf, all the way to the right, behind a spare bottle of solvent and the emergency sewing kit, held a jar of mismatched buttons and a velvet drawstring bag that had belonged to Halmeoni. The velvet had been green once, now it was the colour of tea leaves after the second steep. June tugged the bag open. Its mouth collapsed into her hand with the little sigh velvet makes when it remembers being touched. Inside lay buttons of every mood—pearl and metal, matte brown ridges from old cardigans, a clear plastic one with a tiny daisy trapped inside. Near the bottom was a button she didn’t recognise, slick black with blue fire running under its surface, like a night puddle catching the streetlights. She nudged it into her palm. Warmth shivered through her skin, then the shop flickered. Not the lights, not the radio. The air itself seemed to blink, and the bottom of June’s stomach dropped the way it did when she stepped off a kerb she hadn’t seen. The pressing room melted into something thinner: the sound of the bell over the door, pealing in a steady rhythm; the smell of rain whooshing in; a hand—not hers—sliding the denim jacket off the intake bar. She saw the inside of the collar, the seam at the back of the neck. The hand turned, the cuff dark with water, and the pad of a thumb pressed along the stitching. A sliver of thread lifted. The hand tucked something there, small and flat and the size of a postage stamp, pressed the seam closed like pinching a wound, and the bell rang again and the hand was gone. June gasped and the pressing room clattered back into itself. The button sat in her palm, suddenly ordinary. The radio hissed into the chorus of a pop song. The clock over the door ticked to 8:12. ‘June?’ Her mother again, sharper. ‘I’m going to run to the bank before it closes. Five minutes. Don’t start the steamer while I’m gone.’ ‘Okay!’ June’s voice came out higher than she liked. She tucked the velvet bag back where she’d found it, slid the button into her pocket, and returned to the counter. Mrs Park emerged with the canvas deposit bag and kissed the air near June’s forehead the way she had when June was small and always flinched from lipstick. ‘You’re pale,’ she said. ‘Eat the rest of the kimbap if you didn’t at dinner. It’s in the fridge. Lock the door if anybody weird comes in.’ A look, that precise *you and I both know what weird looks like* look, then she went, the bell jingling in her wake, the door closing tight against the rain. June exhaled. The shop felt bigger all at once, as if her mum had taken a portion of gravity with her. She reached under the counter and pulled the denim jacket into her hands. The humming intensified. Not angry—no object had ever been angry at her—but urgent, like a reminder you’d taped to the door and were about to forget anyway. She ran her fingers along the inside collar. At the very back, just left of the centre punch where a brand label used to be, the stitches were not her mother’s. Mrs Park’s stitches were mechanical and tiny, evenly spaced enough to make a ruler jealous. These had been made by a hand in a hurry, ironed over after. June pressed the edge of her nail under a thread and it lifted, the hum rising in her wrists until it felt like she had touched a live wire. ‘Wait,’ she whispered to it, to herself. ‘I can’t just—’ She had ripped seams before. She had taken in dresses, let them out, made bolts of cloth behave. But those were *their* seams. This was someone else’s secret sewn into the collar of a stranger’s jacket in her mother’s shop. There were rules. Her mother’s voice, calm and inflexible: *We do not snoop. We do not pry. We mend what we are asked to mend.* The clock agreed with the first voice. It said 8:16. The Polaroid had said eight seventeen. Her phone buzzed on the counter. Unknown number. June stared at the screen, her thumb hovering and then slamming down as if the call might bite. One new message: *I’m almost there. Please don’t hand 8179 to anyone else.* She looked up so fast she startled at her own reflection in the front window: a girl with wet hair curling at the ends, apron darkened with steam, eyes wider than normal. The neon OPEN pulsed above her shoulder. The street beyond was nearly empty. The crossing clicked from red hand to the little white walking person and back again for nobody. The bell over the door jangled. A man stepped in, carrying a black umbrella that dripped noisily on the mat. He was handsome in the general way of magazine ads: neutral, careful, in a grey jacket that looked like it had been designed never to wrinkle. He smiled with the corners of his mouth and not at all with his eyes. ‘Evening,’ he said, aimless charm testing for footholds. He shook the umbrella once, gentlemanly, so his rain didn’t get on the pressed clothes. ‘Picking up for R.B.’ He held out a hand that didn’t quite contain a claim ticket. Instead he held a photograph, which he flipped to show the back, where somebody had scrawled *8179.* June’s fingers were on the denim jacket. The humming turned into a word at the back of her throat, the way washers hum on the spin cycle just before they rattle the whole floor. *Not him.* ‘I’m sorry,’ June said, and she heard the evenness in her voice like she was balancing a book on her head. ‘Do you have the receipt?’ The man’s smile widened by a millimetre. ‘My cousin lost it,’ he said easily. ‘R.B. She asked me to grab it. You can check the name.’ He tapped the tag with his finger almost but not quite touching the red letters. ‘Rush. She needs it tonight.’ He glanced at his watch with a movement practised enough that any of the objects in the shop could have recited it. ‘She’s outside.’ June glanced past him at the window. The street was empty in the rain. No red hood moved between the parking metres. No one stood under the awning looking impatient. Her phone buzzed again. Two messages, stacked: *Don’t.* *I’m the one in the red hood.* The second message arrived as if it had been typed on the run. The letters were a little scrambled, the *hood* in lower case, as if the typos had been chased by weather. June felt the jacket’s seam sing beneath her thumb. She could open it. She could refuse politely and let the man unfold his smile one more time. She could stall. Her mother would say *stall until you know what you know.* The clock clicked. 8:17. The bell jerked like something blew through it. The door—still half-open from the man’s arrival—swung wide and banged against the stopper. Rain swept in, carrying the clean, sharp cold of night and the taste of something that had been kept outside because it didn’t belong in rooms. In the doorway, a figure hesitated, rain roaring off the edges of a red hood. The hood lifted. ‘Don’t give it to him,’ the denim said, clear as June’s own name against her ear.