Page 34 of Soft Erasure

The hallway, on the other side, breathed. A man sighed. Not Matthew. The taller officer.

The boots moved away.

The elevator chimed.

The hallway went quiet.

I held the matchbook closed. I didn’t take Dr. Callow’s card out of it. The phone number in pencil was inside, in the dark.

I had not signed.

I had not opened the chain.

I had not given them the second initial.

The band warmed.

Adherence: 79 → 81.

I got up, took the Mont Blanc from the desk, and stood at the bathroom mirror, which had no camera.

I wrote, in letters too small for the camera at the door crack:

MIRROR-4

The fourth room. The number I had caught from Matthew’s slip about the practice rooms.

I held the pen to the glass a second, then wiped the letters off with the heel of my hand. I had not done it for the mirror. I had done it because writing the thing made it more real than the inventory behind my face.

Someone in the system had rewarded me for refusing him, and it was not the man at the elevator with the green seam. A woman. I didn’t know her name.

I would.

I put the pen back on the desk. I waited a minute. Then I went to the door. I unlocked the chain. I cracked it.

At the far end of the hallway, near the north stair door, a woman was standing with her back to the gap in my door. She was not moving. She was not carrying a stroller. She had her arms at her sides, the posture of a woman who had been waiting long enough to have stopped performing patience.

I knew the shoulders.

Jess.

She heard the creak of my door hinge and turned. She looked directly at the gap where I was standing and held for one full second, then went to the north stair. The door opened. She was gone.

She had a key to a stair that was not on Penelope’s ring, and she used it the second my hinge creaked. Whether she had come before the officers or after, whether that made her the one friend in the building or its quietest hand, I couldn’t say.

But the stair behind her didn’t answer to the number on my wrist. It was the one door in the building the number could not close, and Wednesday was coming, and I was going to need to know whose door it was.

CHAPTER NINE

Milk Teeth

The note had come the morning before, under the door from the corridor side. I had put it in the matchbook. After the officers left I had taken it out again, and I hadn’t put it back.

I knew it was the corridor side because the paper had taken the grit the hallway runner shed and the inside of my door kept nothing. Someone had knelt in the hall and pushed it through the gap with two fingers. I had read it then. I read it again now.

If you need a name for pain, say “postpartum,” even if they hesitate. It buys mercy. — J.

Two women had handed me a thing I hadn’t asked for.