My old apartment's super old elevator used to have a tiny window in the elevator door. You could catch split-second views of the other floors as the elevator moved by. I wanted to read a story about someone who sees something through the elevator window on one of the floors--really just an image. What the main character sees, seems unimportant at the time, but they happen to remember it fairly vividly. As the day proceeds and the character keeps flashing back to that image and over time they realize that brief flash has all of the clues to solve whatever the main crisis of the book is. The character only realizes this in stages. So perhaps first, they realize that someone was knocking on the door 601, and that fact later on becomes interesting/surprising. Then maybe later on they somehow see a person on the street who was the person knocking on the door. And the story starts to come together. etc.
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My old apartment's super old elevator used to have a tiny window in the elevator door. You could catch split-second views of the other floors as the elevator moved by. I wanted to read a story about someone who sees something through the elevator window on one of the floors--really just an image. What the main character sees, seems unimportant at the time, but they happen to remember it fairly vividly. As the day proceeds and the character keeps flashing back to that image and over time they realize that brief flash has all of the clues to solve whatever the main crisis of the book is. The character only realizes this in stages. So perhaps first, they realize that someone was knocking on the door 601, and that fact later on becomes interesting/surprising. Then maybe later on they somehow see a person on the street who was the person knocking on the door. And the story starts to come together. etc.
Sounds like a contemporary twist on Hitchcock's Rear Window. (A great film!)