Page 8 of Soft Erasure

“They have a boy now. Ben.”

He watched the number.

The names should have done something to me. I was certain of that, if nothing else. Made my heart rate spike, made my cortisol surge, made the number climb. They didn’t. The number stayed flat.

He put the phone away. Something in his face settled, the look of a man confirming a result.

He had been holding names up to me to see which ones still cut. None of them did. There was no one he didn’t have access to. There was no one who could help me, because everyone was already inside his system.

The system was a web. I was not trapped. I was connected.

That was the same thing.

I had the sensation, somewhere in my chest where the band couldn’t read it, that I had been in this building before. Not in memory. In design.

I closed my hand harder on the card.

The SUV took the long curve onto the access road for Crownhill Residences, and the road was lined with trees that grow only where someone has paid for them to grow.

“You’re going to do well here, Amber. Most of them don’t notice the patterns until the second intake. Most of them don’t notice the cycle until the seventh.”

Seven.

The number was not a number when he said it. The number was a count. The count was the count my body had been doing for as long as I could not remember not doing.

But for a single second, between the e and the v of his saying it, my shoulders dropped half an inch.

I caught it before I chose to. I put the half-inch back. The band didn’t log it. Matthew did.

Crownhill came up over the rise slow and inevitable, old money rising, cream stone, long balconies with no people on them. The fountain in the front circle held a pale stone woman with her hands cupped.

Above the residents’ entrance was a small crest, crown over a hill, a C below the crown that was the same C the brass key in Matthew’s pocket was stamped with.

The building was beautiful because it was built to make a woman believe the prison was a home.

Caleb pulled around to the residents’ entrance. He didn’t speak.

“Penelope is on the desk today,” Matthew said. “She’ll want to see your number. Show her. Don’t speak unless she speaks first.”

“And Amber.”

“Yes.”

“When you’re inside the apartment, you can put down whatever’s in your hand. The cameras don’t read the inside of a closed fist. They read the outside of an open one.”

The card was warm. My palm was sweating.

“Why are you telling me that?”

“Because I want you to trust me. Trust is faster when you give a person a small thing first. I’m giving you the small thing. The small thing is real. There is a blind spot in the cameras. The inside of your closed hand. I’m giving you that.”

Caleb didn’t say goodbye. He held my eyes in the mirror for a second, then let them go.

Matthew got out. He came around and opened my door for me, careful, kind. A doctor helping a patient.

The woman behind the desk had a stillness that takes years to learn, honey hair pinned in a chignon, lipstick in a shade chosen to signal taste rather than warmth.

She received me like something she had been told to expect.