Page 112 of Soft Erasure

“Appetite.”

“Steady.”

“Any change in mood you’d flag on a scale of one to ten.”

“No.”

He checked the band’s readout against a chart on the tablet and nodded at numbers that meant nothing to him past compliance.

Halfway through he turned to note something, his attention dropping the two inches from my face to the screen that mattered more to the room than either of us.

He had not looked at my hands. Nobody in this building ever did.

They had built a whole architecture of watching around one wrist and left the rest of a woman free to do what a wrist could not.

Irene crossed the two steps between the window and my chair in the gap his attention left.

She reached for my wrist the way you check a band’s fit, unremarkable, sanctioned, a gesture the tablet would log as care and file as nothing.

And my body took it for his.

It arrived before I could get in front of it.

A hand landing at the last inch, where I had spent a week bracing for one and getting nothing.

Everything in me went toward it at once. I went heavy and slack the way I did for him, in a chair, at nine in the morning.

I didn’t move.

That was all I had and it was enough, because the man with the lanyard was two inches deep in his screen and didn’t look up.

Her fingers stayed low, under the reach of the single dome fixed near the ceiling seam, the same dead angle Hayes had found in this room the day before.

A trick passed hand to hand. The only way anything of weight had ever moved through this building.

I put the wanting down where it had been living all week, thighs still, hands loose on my knees, and spent the four seconds on what I had come for.

“Marion Delacroix. Discharged ninety-four.” My mouth barely worked to make the words, the near-stillness I had learned watching Hayes do it in this same room. “Ruth Okafor. Discharged ninety-six. Alive. Ohio. There is nobody tied to this family or this state she will open a door for. She will speak to Willson if Hayes vouches the approach. Hayes trusted me with it because of Cora. I am trusting you with it because there is nowhere else left for it to go. Get it to Willson.”

Irene’s face didn’t change.

“I’ll find the road,” she said, close enough to what I had predicted for her yesterday morning, alone on a stairwell with nobody to say it to, that the sentence landed with the weight of a thing that had been waiting for a second owner. “Not through you again. Not after today.”

“Good.”

Her fingers left the band. The man at the table looked up and found nothing worth logging.

A clinician and an observer, standing exactly where a clinician and an observer are supposed to stand.

Underneath it, entirely unread, two names had crossed a distance no lawyer in this building would ever trace back to a source.

“Any concerns to report?” he asked, already reaching for the next line on his screen.

“No,” I said. “None.”

He wrote it down. The band didn’t move while he wrote.

Once he had, once the room had settled back into the shape it was supposed to hold, it did.