Page 9 of Soft Erasure

“Welcome home, Ms. Vale.”

Amber in the car. Amber on the chart. Ms. Vale to a woman who’d never met me and already knew exactly which one to use. Three names in one day, and I couldn’t have told you yet which one, if any of them, was going to end up being mine.

“Show me your wrist, sweetheart.”

I showed her. She read the number off a tablet, no hand required. His hand hadn’t been required either. He’d wanted it anyway. She turned a tablet toward me. My number was already there. Mine was at the top of a column of names that ran down the screen. Each name reduced to two digits. The digits got smaller the farther down they went. I knew I was not the only one. I knew the top was where they all started.

“Ninety-five. That’s a beautiful first number. Welcome to Crownhill.”

Inside the elevator, Matthew pressed six. The doors closed.

He smiled. Not the discharge-room restraint. Something else. The elevator smile. That was what I would call it later, when I had enough of them filed to see the pattern. This one said: we are between floors and the cameras are watching and I am not performing for either of us.

The elevator was small enough that I could feel the heat coming off him without meaning to notice it, six floors of nowhere else to look but at the numbers climbing or at him, and I kept choosing the numbers and losing.

A framed card on the panel: CROWNHILL RESIDENCES: Where recovery is not an end, but a beginning. Below it: Adherence above 88 required for unaccompanied elevator use.

The buttons went up. One through six had numbers. Seven and above had no numbers, just blank circles.

The apartment was on the sixth floor. The door read 6B. Matthew opened it with a brass key. An actual brass key. In a building where everything was digital, he had a physical thing that could open doors without a trace.

He put the key back in his pocket. “The apartment’s yours. For now.”

The apartment had no smell of food. It had the particular blankness of a hotel room between guests, the kind that makes you check the closets before you believe no one else is staying here too. Food arrived from outside and was cleared again before it could leave a mark on the air.

The apartment was the color of cream and the size of my mother’s whole house.

The cashmere on the hook. The books on the shelf. I knew they would be the books a man who had studied my patterns would order in advance, and knowing it didn’t make me want them less.

There was a kitchen with a quartz island. Not yellow. Not the kitchen I grew up in.

I put my hand on my stomach. The muscle memory was the oldest thing in this apartment and the second-oldest thing in my body. The oldest was the count.

“Amber?”

“Yes.”

“You went somewhere.”

“I came back.”

He smiled. Finally. He pulled the door toward himself and paused at the half-closed.

“One more thing. There is a phrase you’ll hear from the other residents. The phrase is safety tastes like surrender. They say it like a joke. It is not a joke. It is the building’s actual position. Think about it tonight. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

He held the look a second past where the sentence needed it, his voice gone quieter than the room required, like he was checking a reading the band couldn’t give him. I wanted him to stay until he found it. I didn’t say so. Saying so would have cost me something he would never have to pay.

He closed the door.

The lock engaged. Not the deadbolt. Something quieter. Something I could not see.

The apartment was the quietest place I had ever stood in.

I went into the bathroom, the only room without a camera.

I opened my hand.

The card was cream-colored. The print was small and clean.