The Espresso I Hate

There is a logic to getting dressed in a dead woman's clothes when the dead woman is you.

I stand in front of her wardrobe, which is its own room, a walk-in cathedral of muted silk and cold wool, everything in a palette of bone and ash and the occasional violence of a red, and I have absolutely no idea what Cosima Wilde puts on her body on a Tuesday she is meeting an acquirer for drinks. I have ideas about what I put on. I put on the navy thing that hides me and the flats that let me run for a train, I put on clothes designed to make a room's eyes slide off me, which is what you wear when you have learned that being noticed only ever ends in being taken from.

But the body knows.

I let it. This is the deal I strike with myself in the cathedral of her clothes, standing there in the borrowed camisole with the dog watching from the bedroom door: I will let the body drive when I do not know the road, and I will take the wheel back the moment I do. So I unclench, just slightly, the way you let a horse have its head on a path it knows, and the hands reach past three things I would have chosen and pull out a grey so dark it is nearly black, a column of it, severe and perfect, and the feet step into heels I could not stand up in, and the whole apparatus assembles itself in the mirror into a woman who runs a building. I watch it happen. I am a girl at the back of a theatre watching the lead get into costume, except the costume is my skin now, and the lead is a corpse, and I am both of them and neither.

I find I am holding my breath. I let it out. Count the rail of clothes if you have to. One grey, two grey, a charcoal, a camel, the red. Five. Six is a coat I would kill for, which is a sentence I retire immediately.

In the bathroom there is more mirror, because the rich line every flat surface with their own faces, and on the counter there is a small ritual laid out in glass and gold, and the hands do that too, unscrewing and tapping and smoothing, while I watch the stranger's face become more itself, more public, more Cosima, and I think about how this is the closest I have ever physically been to her and she does not know I am here. She is not here. That is the thought I keep tripping over and getting up from. Where is she. Where does a murderer's mind go when a murdered woman moves into the apartment.

The leading theory, the one that has been sitting in my chest since the dog first growled, is the obvious one, and it is so bad I have been holding it at arm's length. If I am in her body, she is in mine. Somewhere across the city, my own body, my actual body, the one with the brick-wall window and the navy clothes, is getting up this morning with Cosima Wilde behind the eyes. And if she is in my body, then the version of me that the world thinks is alive is a murderer wearing a victim, and I do not know which of us is the ghost.

I put down the gold thing the hands were holding. My reflection puts it down a beat after me, or before me, I cannot tell anymore, and I make myself stop looking.

The kitchen, when I go back to it, has a coffee machine the size of an engine, and the hands go to it without me, and before I have made a single decision a tiny cup of espresso is sitting in front of me, oily and black and smelling like a tyre fire, and the body lifts it to my mouth and drinks, and the taste is appalling, bitter and scorched and joyless, and I hate it, I have always hated espresso, I am a milk and two sugars person, I am a person who orders the drink that other people roll their eyes at, and the body drinks the whole vile thimble of it down like medicine and sets the cup back in its saucer with a small satisfied click, and somewhere under my breastbone something that is not me sighs with pleasure.

I put both hands flat on the marble and stand very still.

That was not muscle memory. Muscle memory is the feet knowing the floor. This was an appetite. This was wanting. For half a second I wanted the thing she wants, I felt the satisfaction land in a body that was glad of it, and it was not my gladness, it had a different shape, and I recoiled from it the way you recoil from a hand in the dark that turns out to be your own.

The dog growls.

"I know," I tell it. My voice. Her voice. "I don't like it either."

I leave before the apartment can do anything else to me.

The drive is the worst part and the body does all of it. There is a car in a basement that costs more than my whole life did, and the hands take the wheel, and the feet find the pedals, and the body merges into the city traffic with the bored competence of a thing that has done this a thousand mornings, while I sit inside it like a child in a car seat, gripping nothing, steering nothing, watching streets I half-know slide past from a height I have never driven at. I pass the turning to my old flat. The body does not slow. Of course it does not. Cosima never once drove to my flat. She never needed to. When she wanted me, she called, and I went; that was the whole apparatus of us.

Halcyon is a glass tower with a name in brushed steel, and the body parks in a space marked with no number because everyone knows whose it is, and walks in through doors that open before I touch them, and the lobby tips its whole face toward me as I cross it. Good morning, Ms Wilde. Morning, Cosima. A wall of greeting, warm and frightened in equal measure, and the body returns it without me, a nod here, a first name there, a small precise smile rationed out like coin, and I understand that this is a queen crossing her own court, and the court loves her and is terrified of her, and both of those feelings are about to belong to me.

The lift takes me up three floors to a frosted-glass office with her name on it, and outside it, at a desk arranged like an offering, sits a young woman with red-rimmed eyes who flinches when she sees me coming.

She flinches. She is twenty-four at the most, in a cardigan she has buttoned wrong, and there is a tissue balled in her fist, and when the body's eyes land on her she folds in on herself like paper, bracing, and I realise with a slow cold drop that she is bracing for me. For the thing I am wearing. Cosima made this girl cry, recently, this morning, maybe, and the girl is sitting at her desk waiting for the next of it, the way you wait for weather.

"Lacey," the body says, and the name is just there, pre-loaded, "the Meridian deck, I need it before."

And I stop it.

I take the wheel. I feel myself do it, a small wrench, the first real one, taking my own mouth back from the cello voice and bending it into something Cosima has perhaps never said in this building.

"Lacey." A breath. "Whatever I said to you this morning. I was wrong to say it. I'm sorry."

The girl looks up at me like I have pulled a knife. Her mouth opens. Nothing comes out. Behind her terror, in the beat before she can hide it, there is a flash of something so raw and so unused to daylight that it hurts to look at, hope, the hope of a person who has been told for a long time that they do not matter, hearing, for once, that maybe they do. And I know that flash. I have lived inside that flash. I built a whole career out of being the person who got that flash and never the apology, and here I am, holding the apology, in the hands of the woman who withheld it.

"It's. Okay," Lacey says, which is what we say, those of us who get talked over, it's okay, it's fine, don't worry about it, while the bruise sets. "Ms Wilde. It's fine."

"It isn't," I say. "But I'll do better. The deck whenever you have it. No rush."

I go into the office before my face can do anything I cannot afford, and I shut the frosted door, and I lean against it, and through the glass I watch the blurred shape of Lacey sit very still at her desk, holding her balled tissue, trying to understand the weather changing.

The office is all hers. The awards are all hers. There is a glass shelf of them, lit from beneath, and I walk along it reading my own work into her name, plaque after plaque, Cosima Wilde, Visionary of the Year, Cosima Wilde, for Lantern, the interface that changed how the world is read by people the world forgot to design for, and at the end of the shelf there is a framed magazine cover, her face, the face I am wearing, under a single word in white: ORIGINAL.

I designed Lantern. I drew the first version of it on the back of a takeaway menu at two in the morning because my flatmate's mother had gone blind and could not use her phone to call her own daughter, and I built it in a basement over fourteen months, and Cosima Wilde walked past my desk one Friday, looked at my screen for ninety seconds, and by Monday it was hers. The story the whole world believes, the founder's myth on a glass shelf, the magazine that called her original, all of it is mine, and I am the only person left alive who knows it, and I am standing inside the thief.

I sit down in her chair. The chair fits the body perfectly and me not at all.

On the desk, the screen wakes when I touch it, the body's thumbprint letting me in, and there it all is, her whole life laid open, calendar and mail and files, the company breathing in colour-coded blocks, and I am about to start the long careful work of reading my way through the wreckage of her, when a fragment surfaces in my own head that I did not put there.

It is not a thought. It is a memory, fully formed, and it is not mine. A balcony at night, a city's lights laid out below like circuitry, a man's voice I half-recognise saying we close before anyone looks too hard at the IP, and a second voice, lower, a cello, my voice, her voice, saying back, then we make sure no one's left to look. And a feeling comes with it, riding underneath the words, a feeling of cold clean satisfaction, of a problem being handled, of a loose thread about to be cut. It is the most comfortable I have felt since I woke up. That is the horror of it. The memory fits the body like the heels fit the feet, and for one breath I am at home inside it.

Then I understand what I just remembered her saying, and I am out of it, cold, both hands flat on the desk.

I sit in her chair, in her body, and I take the only inventory that matters. I am the woman who designed Lantern. There is no other. The girl in the basement with the takeaway menu is gone, walking calmly toward a stairwell three months out, and there is no one in this whole glass building, no one in this whole city, who knows the work is mine except the mind sitting behind this stolen face. The proof and the thief are the same person now. The witness and the murderer share a skull.

And somewhere under that, quiet, patient, not yet a voice but learning to be one, the body remembers a loose thread, and remembers exactly how it meant to cut it.