Page 116 of Soft Erasure

It only has to be simple enough that nobody asks for the second half of the tape.

I didn’t know which was closer to true, and I never had.

I had asked it in the dark where the band could not price the asking. I had never once come back from the asking with anything I could hold.

The panel cut back to Penelope. She had lost the room and knew it, and Caleb had drifted half out of frame.

Under all of it, in the crawl, a line I read twice.

A FORMER CLINICIAN OF THE PROGRAM HAS PROVIDED SWORN STATEMENT TO INVESTIGATORS.

Hayes.

Eight years out of that program, finally spent in a sworn room instead of a Friday morning kept off the record.

Ruth Okafor would take longer.

Ohio was not a twenty-four-hour errand, and Willson would not rush a fragile witness onto a record before the woman was ready to stand on it.

So Willson had built this hour out of Hayes alone, one woman’s eight years against a family that could dress its own lobby for a camera inside a morning.

Marion and Ruth still sat where I had put them, waiting on a road Irene had promised to find and had not found yet.

The rest of it had gone out anyway, faster than I had built it to run. It was not being careful about what it took down on the way.

My hands weren’t steady.

I noticed it from a distance, cataloging, the way I noticed most things about my body now. The fingers first, then the jaw, then a shake that started under the ribs and worked its way out to both arms. They had been steady in the Garden Room.

Saturday had cost something small and controlled. I had spent it with my mouth barely moving and my face giving a stranger nothing.

There was no version of this hour I could hold that still.

The band warmed against my wrist.

Adherence: 67 → 63.

Four points.

More than the Garden Room had taken off me, more than any single morning that week, and I had earned none of it.

I had sat in a chair and watched a hand on my elbow become a headline.

The machine read the hands and the pulse and the short breathing and priced all of it, and it didn’t care that I hadn’t chosen any of it.

Then I went to the wall unit beside the door. Scheduling sits at the far end of that button.

I had caught my hand halfway to that button on a Thursday night and put it back down. I didn’t put it back down now.

My arm went out and the bracing came up under it, shoulder tightening, elbow pulling the reach up short, setting itself against an interruption it had a year of practice at expecting.

It did that now over a button, in an empty apartment, for a man on administrative leave in a city that had just been told what he was.

My arm went the whole distance and found only the wall waiting at the end of it. I wanted him in the body then, wordless, a want I had given up negotiating with somewhere back in the week.

I pressed it.

A recorded voice gave me the hours of an empty desk.