Page 86 of Soft Erasure

A woman offered a car and a clear road who turned around and walked back inside on her own two feet, filed as compliance, when the truth under it had nothing to do with obedience at all.

Matthew still didn’t know what Edward had told me, or what I’d turned down at the curb after hearing it.

Both would cost him something whether or not he ever found out, and I hadn’t yet decided which one would cost him more.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Cora’s Kitchen

Cora’s message came through my own phone, which is the least private object I own, and she hadn’t bothered to disguise a word of it.

Come to mine tonight. Seven. Don’t tell anyone which door.

No signature. A number I didn’t recognize under it, already dead by the time I tried it back.

Her other note had gone into the sink on Thursday, the handwriting first and then the paper. Nobody was ever going to log Edward’s name off a thing that no longer existed.

I went out through the courtyard service door at ten to seven. That door had never learned a thing about me and didn’t start now. Ninety minutes before the building asks after a resident.

It had never occurred to me that the woman who carried Ben’s stroller strap and my folded secrets in the same pocket had a door of her own, three streets east.

She let me in without a word and locked the door behind me the way people lock doors when the lock is the only thing that has ever belonged only to them.

The kitchen was small enough that three people made it full. A kettle. A child’s drawing pinned under a magnet, not Ben, some other child. No dome in the ceiling. Something in my shoulders let go that I hadn’t known was being held.

Matthew was already at the table.

He stood when I came in, too fast, the chair scraping loud in a room that small. She hadn’t told me he would be here.

“She called me an hour before she called you,” he said. “I didn’t ask how she got my number. I came because she told me you’d already decided not to say no.”

“I didn’t say yes either.”

He looked at the three chairs, no two of them matching. “You never do.”

Cora set a mug in front of each of us, tea neither of us had asked for, and didn’t sit.

“I’m not staying,” she said. “Whatever this is, it isn’t mine to hear.” She was already reaching for her coat, and she didn’t soften the next part. “There’s no eye in that ceiling. I’ve got a boy in that house four days a week now and a fourth band coming, and I’ve run out of ways to be useful to him from a hallway.”

She got the coat on. “Door doesn’t lock behind me. Use the room or don’t. I’m not asking which.”

She let herself out as she’d let me in, quiet, quick, no click behind her.

He didn’t move toward it.

“You saw Edward this afternoon,” he said.

I didn’t answer fast enough, and we both heard the size of what the pause was covering.

“He told me to say he asked after you.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No.”

“What did he want.”

“I’ve had four hours to work out which version of telling you costs you less, and I haven’t got there.” I made myself hold his eyes through it. “I’m not handing you a thing I haven’t finished pricing.”