Page 124 of Soft Erasure

“Stays on.”

I waited for the rest of it.

“I know how that sounds,” she said. “The record it produces is part of the estate. Switch it off today and defense counsel gets to argue the data was tampered with after seizure, and every woman on this floor loses the only unbroken account of what was done to her.” She let that stand. “I’m not asking you to like it. I’m telling you what it costs.”

I stood in my own kitchen and understood that the machine had not been dismantled. It had been sold. It had gone from a family to a court, and the court had reasons, and the reasons were better than any reason the family had ever bothered to give me, and none of that reached my wrist. The band didn’t know it had changed hands.

“There was a chair on Wednesday,” I said.

“There is no Wednesday.” She checked the folder without opening it. “Clinical scheduling is suspended. Anything that ran through this building’s own staff is suspended with it.”

“There’s a child.” My voice went flat and level. “A household arrangement. Three hours, four days. It was written as a term.”

For the first time she looked at me instead of at the room.

“Any arrangement the family used as consideration is an asset,” she said. “Assets get reviewed. That one will go to mediation, and it will not be quick, and I would be lying if I told you which way it lands.” She closed the folder she had never opened. “It’s the last honest thing I have for you. The family cannot trade him anymore. Neither can anybody else.”

She let herself out. The gray women were already two doors down.

The band went warm and stayed warm, longer than it ever had, the whole instrument reaching for something it had been cut off from since Sunday. Then it found the far end. Somebody had put the system back up for the audit, and the first thing it did with its new owners was look at me.

Adherence: 66 → 62.

Four points, for standing in a kitchen and being told a boy was an asset. It would go on pricing that into a record a judge would read.

The pantry wall opened at eleven.

A wall that has spoken once does not speak twice about nothing.

Matthew came through it.

The same gray shirt, or one close enough that I couldn’t tell. Three days of not shaving now instead of one.

“You said there wasn’t a tomorrow where you got another chance,” I said.

“There wasn’t.” He didn’t come past the counter. “You bought me two days.”

“I didn’t buy you anything.”

“You told a detective you would not give her one word about me.” He said it flat. “She could not open a file on a man she had no name for. That is the whole of it. Two days.”

I’d spent Sunday night believing I protected him. On Tuesday I heard what it had actually done. A witness is a person the state has a use for. I had kept him off her record, and off a record is not the same as safe. Off a record is a man with nothing between him and the first prosecutor who learns his name.

“I made you a subject,” I said.

“You made me unowned.” He almost smiled and didn’t finish it. “That is worth two days. I spent them.”

He was eight feet away and I wanted him closer. It wasn’t the wanting I had carried up four flights of stairs all week. That one had been for a hand. This one was for a person who would still be standing there in an hour. A year of learning to want contact, because contact was the only thing this building ever let me run short of. Nobody had told me there was a worse kind of shortage than that.

He set a printed page face down on the counter. He didn’t slide it toward me.

“The program takes baseline footage on everyone it intends to enroll,” he said. “Early, and in the house, because that is where a child is himself. I wrote that protocol. I have had his copy since the week they opened him a file.”

“You could have taken this to her.”

“I could have.” He looked at the page and not at me. “A court has no use for it. It is evidence of a morning. I have had it since before I had you, and I could not hand it over while there was a number on your wrist they could charge you for taking it.”

I turned it over.