In the darkness, the boy started crying quietly.

Not loudly.

Not for attention.

Just the small, tired crying of a child who had learned no one usually came.

The woman’s voice was different now.

Soft.

Scared.

“What’s your name?”

The boy swallowed.

“Eli.”

She covered her mouth even though he couldn’t see it.

“My sister named her baby Eli.”

The boy froze.

“Your sister?”

The woman pressed herself against the elevator wall, trying to breathe.

“She disappeared eight years ago. They told us she ran away.”

The boy’s voice trembled.

“My mother said if I ever got lost, I should find the building with the gold doors. She said the key would prove I belonged there.”

The woman closed her eyes.

The top floor.

The gold doors.

The key.

All the things her sister used to whisper about before their father forced her out for loving a poor man.

The boy whispered, “Did my mom live here?”

The woman’s tears finally fell.

“Yes.”

The elevator lights flickered back on.

She saw his face clearly now.

His eyes.

His mouth.

The same tiny scar on his chin.

Her sister’s child.

The boy looked at her necklace, then at his own key.

“Then why did you tell me to go outside?”

The woman broke.

She dropped to her knees in front of him, her expensive suit touching the dirty elevator floor.

“Because I became the kind of person who would have ignored my own sister.”

The doors opened.

A group of residents stared.

But the woman only held out her shaking hand to the boy.

“You came to the right floor,” she whispered. “You came home.”