Page 38 of Soft Erasure

Half an Inch

The next morning, I had stopped singing.

He had told me not to stop on his account, so I had stopped. It was the only thing I could take back without the band logging it. The band read a heart, not a hum.

The apartment smelled of citrus and ammonia. The citrus was the cleaner. The ammonia was the building’s own, the undertone that ran under everything like a wire no one had found.

On the breakfast bar, where I had left it, the empty Ward & Huxley pouch. I knew what it had held. I knew what it had been emptied of, and where, and that the ring had been cleaned before it went back on a hand.

I didn’t pick it up. I sat at the bar and counted what should not have been there, two mornings after I’d refused the welfare check.

Three things were on the counter that should not have been there. The Valley Suites sheet. The Ward & Huxley pouch. A torn strip of laundry slip the length of a thumb.

The first two I had carried in from the padded envelope. The third I hadn’t seen before. It had come in the night, set down by a hand while I slept, and nothing on my wrist had logged the hand.

I picked up the slip. One edge was perforated, torn off a roll. In cheap thermal print it read:

…STOM PRESS

A fragment. A tear, not a cut. The missing letters were not hard: the sheet was from Valley Suites, which ran a service called Custom Press, a shirt re-pressed before a meeting. CUSTOM PRESS, torn down to STOM PRESS.

There was a green dot in one corner, small as a pinhead. I’d thought it was ink. It was not ink. It was polish, the green a jeweler’s compound leaves on platinum, transferred when a ring touched the paper. A ring with a green seam at the band. Matthew’s hand had been on this slip before mine. He left the green on the things that reached me, the way another man leaves initials. A mark. A claim. A hand laid on what he had decided was his.

I was gathering his marks as evidence. He was leaving them as something else.

The phone on the counter buzzed. Unknown number, one line.

UNKNOWN (I.C. relay): The lobby clip. Eleven-second mark. Look at the reflections. Run it twice. — I.C.

She hadn’t needed to be at my door.

I typed back.

AMBER: The portal only sends trims. The trims don’t show what got cut.

UNKNOWN: Record it anyway. The cuts are the truth.

I went to the television. It came on without a remote, the way it did every morning once my wrist crossed the line the building watched for. The system put a file on the screen. A new clip.

CONSENT_3B_trim_lobby.mp4

Different from the last. The label said lobby, not the mirrored room. The watermark in the corner pulsed MIRROR-3B, and it was wrong: this was the lobby, not that room. They had reused the file structure and the watermark with it. Someone had been sloppy.

I held my phone up to the screen and pressed record. I didn’t press play. There was nothing for me to press. The building played it for me.

The clip ran twenty-four seconds.

The lobby. The marble. The chair. Jess, from five, Noah on her hip. The woman who had left the note. Penelope at the desk. Matthew in a white shirt, the same shirt, pressed.

On the chair, a version of me.

The version of me said, “I’m choosing —”

The clip cut.

It cut on I’m choosing, before the verb. No glitch, no stutter. A clean cut, made by an instrument built for it. What I said next was not on this file. It was on a server the program kept and I didn’t.

I froze the frame. I leaned in.