Page 132 of Soft Erasure

Three nights the chain hung loose and nothing came through it.

After that I stopped counting the nights and started living inside them, which wasn’t the same as being at peace. It was the closest version my body had on offer.

I had spent thirteen months learning to read a wall for what it was built to tell me. This was the first week I spent reading one for nothing at all. I went to bed with it anyway.

My arm still braced. It had started on a Friday in a lit apartment and it had not stopped since, my whole arm setting itself against a hand arriving at the last inch to take the reach out of it. On the second night I reached for a cabinet and felt the bracing come up under it out of pure practice, in a room with nobody in it. I let it happen. A body that spends a year learning where the interruptions live does not get told when they stop.

Willson called four days later, brief, businesslike.

Her counsel had filed. The financial charges were moving toward a hearing nobody had scheduled. The residential piece, the part that touched me, sat where it had sat since the warrants went in. Open.

“I don’t have an ending for you,” she said. “I have a Tuesday with more paperwork in it than the one before.”

I didn’t know whether he would ever be free of it. I had stopped asking the kitchen to answer that.

Eleven o’clock, and the pantry wall spoke first.

I was at the counter when it started. I crossed the room the way I had crossed it the first time, already moving before I agreed to move.

The hatch gave easily. A hinge the wall had kept hidden for a year and stopped hiding in a second.

The stairwell behind it was dark. Matthew stood in the dark of it in neither the suit nor the sweater. A shirt, sleeves shoved back.

“I heard you might still be up,” he said.

“You didn’t hear that. Nobody’s watching this apartment anymore.”

“No.” He didn’t come through. He stood in the frame of it with the width of the counter still between us. “I came anyway. That’s the whole explanation. I didn’t have a reading to justify it with this time.”

I let it sit in the kitchen a moment.

“Come in, then.”

He stepped through, and the hatch swung shut behind him on its own weight. The wall went back to being a wall, with a man in front of it who had nothing left to explain himself to.

I didn’t have the drive. I put it into a detective’s hand in a glass room. Everything on it is sealed now under an order with my own file number in it.

What I had was the reading I did at this counter with a phone screen throwing light up into my face. I went back through that instead, twice, out of memory, the only copy anybody is going to leave me.

It came out the same both times. He knew what his own model was built to do to a woman like me and built it anyway, for people who signed his checks and called it medicine. Then he watched it break in the first weeks of my intake and chose to stay broken rather than report it.

Both of those held. I gave it a week to see whether one would go quiet. Neither did.

“I went back through it,” I said. “Both folders. All the way through, twice.”

“You can’t have. It went in sealed with the rest of it.”

“From memory. It’s the only copy I get.”

“Then you have it better than the court does.” He put no weight on it at all. “What did you decide.”

“Nothing, reading it. I decided before I opened it the second time. Going back through it was me making sure the decision could survive the worst version of you I can still reconstruct.”

I looked at him across the counter. It had held a drive, a court-sealed case, a still print. Tonight it held two cups and a kettle neither of us had touched.

“It survived.”

Something moved through his face. I had learned to read him the way I once learned to read a band, and I had never yet caught this one lying.