Page 78 of Soft Erasure

Two days to decide what Friday was worth.

The building had already started deciding for me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Five-Oh-Six

By Wednesday, Callow still hadn’t sent the name she’d promised. She found me before she meant to, in the stairwell between four and five. No citrus cleaner. No dome. No reason for either of us to be standing in it.

“Camera upgrade’s on the schedule,” she said. “Posted this morning. South corridor, Thursday, eight a.m. Facilities. Three names on the work order, all of them real.”

“Thursday.”

“Thursday.” She didn’t soften it. “The seam closes tonight. Whatever you were going to do with Friday, you do it somewhere else or you do not do it at all.”

“Who posted it.”

“Facilities. Nobody whose name means anything to either of us.” She didn’t start climbing. She always moved when she talked. “I said I would have a name by Wednesday. I do not have one. I have a work order instead, and it does not care whose idea it was.”

She was gone before I could ask the question that mattered.

I ran it on the landing without her. A schedule had crossed a desk on Friday with my name on the wrong line of it. He had read that line inside an hour. He told me so himself. He checked everything. There was no version of this week where a work order went up in his own building and reached Irene Callow before it reached him.

So he had seen it and said nothing to me. Or he had not seen it, which was not a thing that happened to him. Or he had posted it.

I put all three in the place I keep what I have no instrument for.

Then my body did what it had been doing since Monday, which was want him on no schedule at all. In a stairwell. With the arithmetic still running.

I’d been banking it since the kitchen. I had held his hand still against my own face and called that keeping. Two days of it had taught me what a held thing does. It does not go quiet. It goes somewhere and waits with the lights on.

Penelope didn’t use the panel.

She came up to six and said it at the door, which she had not once done since the week I arrived.

“Ms. Vale. Mrs. Ashford would like to see you this afternoon. Three o’clock. Bring nothing.”

A woman who ran that building from a desk had come up five floors to deliver fifteen words. I thanked her and didn’t ask. She went back down. Nothing in her face said whose sentence she had been carrying up.

I wore what I wore for the salon. I didn’t own anything built for this. Dressing like myself in a room that had never seen me would have been its own kind of confession.

Marissa Ashford opened the door herself. No aide. No cart.

“Ms. Vale.” She said it the way you check a figure against a total you already have. “Thank you for coming on short notice.”

“I was not given a choice.”

“No.” She didn’t pretend otherwise. “Come in.”

Then they made me wait.

Not in the hall. Inside, in a chair by the door, with the apartment going on around me. Water I had not asked for and didn’t drink. Twice she said someone would be with me shortly. The second time she didn’t look up to say it.

An hour and forty minutes. I counted them because counting was the only work available to me in that chair. The band read a woman sitting down, which is what it reads for everything, and charged me nothing for it.

Everyone in that apartment was watching me, and none of the watching was his. The family watched the way you watch a number that might not balance. He watched like the number was the only one on the page.

I’d asked this family for two seconds. They were spending an afternoon answering.