Page 104 of Soft Erasure

Then the brass key turned the other way from the corridor side, and the lock took, and the panel above the jamb stayed dark, because nothing about any of it was something this building knew how to write down.

I stood in the middle of my own foyer with my hand at my neck where his had been.

I didn’t know where he had come from, or whether he was inside the program or outside it, whether he had eight hours left in that building or eight weeks, whether Wednesday had been taken off him or handed back. I knew less than I had at midnight.

I had asked to be shown.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Friday Morning

The pool opened at five for everyone in the building except me. Seventy didn’t buy water.

It was not a number I had earned but one handed to me for standing still. I’d never trusted a gift that arrived for doing nothing.

And it was Friday. Facilities got its answer on retention today.

Before dark the last two days on the dome above the north stair would be counted and cleared and gone, and everything on them with it.

I’d stayed Thursday night for that reel. Today the staying had to buy something.

I’d slept, in the end, some version of sleep that leaves a body upright and a mind still standing guard at the door.

The matchbook had not moved from the shelf, and nothing folded inside it had shifted either.

The band was still warm from the night when the text came through.

WELLNESS (07:02): Continuity assessment, 9:00, Garden Room. Clinician: E. HAYES, LCSW. Confirmed under continuing-care protocol.

Not the substitute this time. A name. Initials first.

The building always led with initials, saving the whole of a person for later.

The room didn’t usually name a chair. Wednesday’s had come with no name on it at all.

This one arrived with one attached before I asked, which meant a hand somewhere had decided I should have it.

I didn’t ask myself why yet.

Seventy didn’t open the elevator to a woman alone in it, so I went down by the service stairs instead, four flights, one hand on the cold rail, a small honest thing in a building that manufactured most of its honesty.

The Garden Room held its usual light, glass on three sides, the front circle white below where the mothers walked their children at hours it had assigned them.

No pitcher on the small table this morning. No bowl.

I noted it before I noted the woman, because it told me more, faster, about what the next hour would and would not ask of my body.

A woman sat where the chair was set for the clinician, upright, hands folded on a closed folder. A gray blazer buttoned like the room might still ask something formal of her.

Not young. Not old enough to be Callow, and nothing like the age Edward wore.

She stood when I came in. She didn’t offer her hand.

“Ms. Vale. Eleanor Hayes.”

“You ran Wednesday.”

“I did.”