The Back of My Own Head

The door behind me opens without a knock, and a man's voice says, "We need to talk about your timeline, Cosi, because you are starting to scare the buyers and frankly you're starting to scare me."

I turn the chair. The man in the doorway is built like Cosima sketched in a heavier hand.

Same dark colouring, same hard jaw, same way of standing as if the room is a thing he has been asked to evaluate, but where she is edited he is just expensive, a suit doing a lot of work, a watch doing the rest, and the body knows him before I do, the way it knows everything, with a small internal recalibration that says brother and careful and do not show him the seam. Damien. The name arrives. Damien Wilde, and the second word the body offers up about him, unbidden, is owes, which I do not understand yet but which I file with the rest.

"Good morning to you too," I say.

"It is not a good morning." He shuts the door and does not sit, which tells me he intends to win this. "Meridian's people called me at six because they couldn't get you, which they couldn't get you because you went quiet for, what, the whole weekend, you didn't answer Adam, you didn't answer me, and now their due diligence wants a sit-down about provenance, Cosi. Provenance. You know what that word means in this context and you know who it lands on."

I do not know who it lands on. I know what provenance means. It means who made the thing, who owns the thing, can you prove the chain of it, and in this context the thing is Lantern, and the chain leads, if anyone pulls hard enough, to a basement and a takeaway menu and a junior designer no one photographed. It lands on her. It lands on me. It is, I understand with a small electric jolt, the loose thread from the memory that is not mine, the one a voice on a balcony promised to cut.

"What did you tell them," I say, which is a safe thing to say in any meeting, and the body says it in the cello voice, cool, and Damien's shoulders come down half an inch because that is apparently the Cosima he expected.

"That you'd give them the founder narrative and a clean paper trail and they'd never have to ask again." He studies me. Something flickers behind his eyes, the same thing I saw flicker in Adam's, in Lacey's, a small wrongness detected and not yet named. "You're being weird. You've been weird since Friday. If you're having one of your, your episodes, now is the worst possible," he stops himself, recalibrates, lowers it, "is this about her again."

The body goes very still. I go very still, but for a different reason, because I do not know who her is and the body does and the body has just clenched around the word like a fist.

"Is what about who," I say, too carefully.

"Talia." He says my name like a thing he is tired of cleaning up. "The Frost girl. Cosi, I swear to God, if you have got yourself wound up about that again, after I told you to leave it, to just let the deal close and let it go." He pinches the bridge of his nose. "She's a junior designer with a grievance and a long memory. She is nothing. She cannot prove anything that a good lawyer can't bury. Stop, whatever it is you are thinking of doing, stop thinking about it."

I am nothing. She is nothing. I sit in the dead woman's chair and listen to her brother call me nothing, and somewhere under the borrowed ribs the rage that is going to be my whole problem for the rest of this lifts its head and looks around for something to set on fire. The cold clean satisfaction from the not-mine memory is still there too, sitting beside the rage, and for one terrible second the two of them shake hands, and I want, with a want that is half mine and half hers, to handle the thread the way she was going to handle it.

I take my mouth back.

"I'm not doing anything," I say, and it is true and a lie at once, because I am going to do everything, just not the way he fears, not her way. "Tell Meridian I'll meet provenance head-on. Set it up." Which is the opposite of what she would do, the opposite of burying, and I watch Damien's frown deepen at a Cosima who wants to walk toward the loose thread instead of cutting it.

"Head-on." He says it like I have asked to set the building alight. "You hate head-on. You have never once in your life walked toward a question you could pay to disappear." He waits. I give him nothing, because nothing is all I have. "Fine," he says at last, not meaning fine. "Fine. But if you wobble this deal, Cosi, it is not just your name on it." And there it is, the body whispers up the word again, owes, and the door shuts behind him, and I am alone with the founder's myth and the espresso aftertaste and the dawning understanding that everyone in this building can feel that the woman they know is gone, they just have not let themselves know what they know.

I do not get any work done. I open her files and her mail and I cannot read them, because all I can think about is her. Talia. Me. The girl with the grievance and the long memory, alive across the city this morning in a body Cosima is wearing, walking toward a stairwell three months out. I have to see. It is a hook in me, low and constant. I have to see what she does with my body, and there is exactly one place I know to look, because it is where I was every Tuesday at one for two years, queuing for a milk and two sugars at a coffee place called Margery's between Halcyon and the river, where my sister works the counter on the early shift.

Joss.

The thought of Joss undoes a knot in me that the mirror and the dog and the man I loved could not reach. My little sister. Loud, messy, twenty-seven, the one who got all the volume our family was rationing while I got the quiet, who calls me four times a day about nothing, who would, I know with total certainty, burn down this entire glass tower if she understood what had happened in it. And she is right there, eleven minutes' walk away, and I cannot tell her. To Joss, Cosima Wilde is the famous cow who stole her sister's work, an enemy with a magazine cover. If I walk into Margery's in this face, the best I can hope for is to be served coldly. I will not get to be held. I will not get to say it's me, Joss, it's me.

I go anyway. Of course I go. It was never going to be a choice.

I walk the eleven minutes because the body wants the car and I refuse it the car, a small mutiny, mine, and Margery's has the same steamed-up window and the same chalkboard and the same smell of burnt milk it has always had, and through the glass I can see Joss behind the counter with her hair coming out of its clip, and my heart, her heart, our heart, climbs into my throat.

I go in. The bell over the door does its small bright thing. Joss looks up, and her face does the polite professional brightening it does for any customer, and then it sees the face I am wearing and it closes like a shop at night.

"Ms Wilde." Flat. Careful. Joss knows exactly who Cosima is. "What can I get you."

"A," I start, and the body wants to say a flat white, and I refuse it that too, "a milk and two sugars. Please." Talia's order. I watch it land on Joss as a tiny wrong note, a flicker, gone.

She makes it. I watch my sister make my coffee for a stranger and I have to hold the counter, because this is the wound in its purest form, distilled down past the stolen work and the stolen man to the bare bone of it: I am standing three feet from the one person who has loved me my whole life, in the one face she would never look at twice, and I have been erased so completely that even she serves me like furniture. A lifetime of being copied and talked over was only ever rehearsal for this. There is no smaller I have ever been. While the milk hisses she says, not looking at me, in the careful voice you use on someone you have decided to dislike politely, "I'm surprised to see you in here." A beat. "Talia used to come in here. My sister. You know her. You'd know her better than I would lately, the state of things." The bitterness in it is for me, the Cosima me, and it is deserved, and it guts me.

"How is she," I say, before I can stop the question, and it comes out too soft, too hungry, in the wrong voice, and Joss looks up sharply at the strangeness of Cosima Wilde asking after the junior she ruined like she actually wants to know.

"Why do you care," Joss says. And then, because Joss cannot hold a hard line for long, because she is mine and she loves too loudly, it spills out of her anyway, the worry she has been carrying. "She's, honestly? She's been off. Months now. Flat. Far away. The last time she sat right there she looked at me like she was reading subtitles. And now she doesn't pick up at all, hasn't for weeks, and I kept telling her, you're not yourself, Tal, and she'd just," Joss shrugs, scared under the shrug, "smile. Say she's fine. She's not fine. She's not herself."

Not herself. The words snag on something and will not come loose. Because I am not in that body. I am here, in this one, drinking espresso I hate. So who sat in Margery's smiling like she was reading subtitles, who is wearing my face and worrying my sister, if it is supposed to be Cosima, and Cosima does not smile like that. Cosima smiles like a door closing. I have the proof of it on a mirror this morning.

"Joss," I say, and I do not even know I have said her first name until it is out, her name that a stranger would not know, and her head comes up fast, "she," I almost say she'll be okay, I almost say something only a sister could promise, I almost reach across the counter, I get my whole self right to the lip of it, "she'll come back to herself. I think. People do."

Joss stares at me. The flicker is bigger this time. A stranger does not call her Joss. A stranger does not say that with my exact cadence. She opens her mouth, and I cannot be here, I cannot do this, I will break and tell her everything across a coffee counter and she will call someone to take Cosima Wilde away, so I put a note on the counter and take the cup with the wrong-right coffee in it and I go, fast, out into the street with the bell jangling behind me.

And across the road, on the far pavement, walking away from me with her hair down and her navy coat and her flat shoes built for running for a train, is me.

My body. My actual body. The back of my own head, the set of my own shoulders, my own walk, unmistakable, the way you would know your own walk anywhere, going away from me down the street toward the river, on the exact street Joss says she no longer comes to, calm, unhurried, not afraid of anything, three months from a stairwell.

The coffee falls out of my hand. I do not feel it hit. Every cell in this borrowed body is screaming one thing, and I cannot tell if the scream is mine or hers, and I step off the kerb into the road, toward the back of my own head, toward the body that is supposed to be three months and a whole city away from this moment.

And the figure in the navy coat stops walking. Stands still in the middle of the pavement, in the middle of the day, for no reason at all.

And starts, slowly, to turn around.