A Date I Can't Place

The room is waiting for me to flinch, and the notebook is waiting for me to claim it, and I cannot do either.

It sits dead centre on the polished table, small and cheap and mine, a cardboard cover gone soft at the corners from years of being shoved into a bag and dropped on a floor, and I know without opening it that the takeaway menu is still folded in the back, three for two on a Tuesday, and I know the page it lies open to because I drew it at two in the morning with a felt tip going dry, the first sketch of the thing that became Lantern, a little hand-drawn lamp throwing light onto a grid. Mine. The most undeniably mine object on earth, set out where eleven people can watch me look at it.

Both of us lurch. I feel the sleeper come up under my breastbone with the same hunger I have, reaching for the same thing for the opposite reason, she to know what Damien knows, me to hold the only proof I exist, and for half a second the two wants are indistinguishable, a single greedy pull toward the table, and I let neither of them move my feet.

Cosima would not cross a room for an object. Cosima makes the object cross to her.

"Sit," I tell the room, in the cello, and I do not look at the notebook again. I look at Damien.

He has set his trap with real craftsmanship, I will give him that. The board are arranged down both long sides like a jury, Naomi Adler at the far end with her reading glasses pushed up into grey hair and a face that gives nothing, and three Meridian suits clustered near Damien, young and clean and expensive, the due-diligence team, the people whose entire job this week is to pull threads. And the notebook between us all, the bait, placed so that whatever I do with my face becomes evidence. If I grab for it, I am unhinged. If I deny it, there it sits, contradicting me. If I freeze, the seam shows. He has built a question I cannot answer cleanly, which is exactly what I would have built, and the smoothness with which I can read his move is a cold little splash on the back of my neck.

"You found my notebook," I say.

It comes out of me before I have decided it, and it is the right thing, it is the only thing, because the body knows something the mind is a beat behind on, that the fastest way to defang a planted object is to pick it up by the throat first. I let one corner of the mouth go up. I make it lazy. I make it a woman amused that her brother went digging.

"Where was it," I say. "Tell me you didn't go through the basement yourself, Damien, you'll have ruined a suit."

A flicker goes round the table, the small social relief of people who came expecting a scene and got a quip instead, and I feel Lacey, half a pace behind, let a breath go. Damien does not loosen. His eyes stay on me, patient, the way Pim watches a closed cupboard.

"It was logged into the archive intake last week," he says. "Under your initials." He lets that sit. "Someone returned it. I thought you'd want it for today, given the topic." He gestures, open-handed, a man being helpful. "Provenance."

Someone returned it. Logged under C.W. I did not return it. I have not touched it in two years. Which means it has been somewhere, in someone's hands, all this time, and a week ago a hand that was not mine put it back into the building under my initials, and Damien either did it or knows who did, and either way he is telling me, in front of the buyers, that he can produce my proof and my erasure in the same gesture, that the notebook is his now, not mine, a piece on his board.

Count. One: a notebook that walked back into the building on its own. Two: my own initials on a return I never made. Three: a brother who would only show me a card this good if he already held a better one. Three is enough to know I am behind.

"How thoughtful," I say.

Naomi Adler speaks for the first time, dry, from the end of the table. "Are we going to discuss the Meridian provenance schedule, or admire the stationery." She does not look up from her papers. It is not a kindness, she is bored and on a clock, but it is a door, and I walk through it before Damien can shut it.

"We're going to discuss both," I say, "because they're the same conversation." I sit. I make them watch me arrange myself, unhurried, a woman with all the time the room does not have, and I put my hand flat on the table a careful eighteen inches from the notebook, near it, owning the air around it, not touching it. "Lantern's authorship is the only question in this deal that matters, and everyone in this room knows it, and the slide my team prepared," and I hear myself say my team, almost too warm, almost mine, and the body smooths it back into the cello before anyone clocks it, "says founder, with internal support. Meridian's people are going to test that. That's their job. So let's not waste the morning pretending the schedule is clean."

The lead Meridian suit, a woman with a tablet and a lanyard nicer than Lacey's whole outfit, looks up sharply. I have just handed her the thread she came to pull, openly, as if it were mine to give. Beside me Lacey has gone very still, pen stopped. Damien's folded hands tighten by a degree I would not have caught in my own old body and catch easily now, because the body has spent two years learning to read him.

"That's a candid framing," the Meridian woman says.

"I'm a candid person," I say, which is the largest lie I have told since I woke up dead, and the table laughs, because Cosima is famously not, and the lie passes as wit. Under the table my own thumbnail finds the seam of my own palm and presses, an anchor, a small private pain that is mine and only mine, to hold the cello steady while I do the thing I came in with no notes to do.

I open the provenance fight on purpose. Toward the proof, not away from it. Because the basement is in cold storage behind a lock I half-hold, and the notebook is on the table behind a logged return I cannot explain, and the slide is a lie I refuse to spend the rest of my borrowed life defending. The only way I survive being the thief is to stop acting like one, in tiny visible increments, while the thief's brother watches for the seam.

"The early development files exist," I say. "First year, pre-rebrand. They were moved to cold storage five weeks ago." I watch Damien for it, and I get it, the smallest stillness, the held breath of a man whose own clean move has just been read aloud. "Storage costs," I say, gently, into that stillness. "I signed it. We should bring them back up before due diligence asks why a company would archive the foundational IP of its flagship product the same quarter it goes up for sale. That's the kind of timeline that reads badly in a data room."

It is the truest thing I can say in his grammar, and it lands like a blade going in slow. I have just turned his cover-up into a liability in front of the buyers, framed as a founder protecting the deal, and he cannot object without explaining why the files went cold in the first place. Naomi's glasses come down off her hair. The Meridian woman is writing.

"I'll arrange the retrieval," Damien says, even, recovering, and there it is, he will not, of course he will not, two-of-three, he holds one key and I hold one and IT answers to him, and what he means is that nothing comes up out of the cold without him in the room, and his eyes flick to the notebook and back to me, a man laying his next card face down, telling me that he can let the basement up on his terms or keep it down on his terms and that either way the only loose piece of proof he could not lock, the cardboard thing with the menu in the back, is sitting under my own hand on his table.

"Good," I say. "This week."

The meeting moves. Schedules, dates, the dull machinery of a sale, and I run it the way she would, letting silences work, agreeing to nothing I have not weighed, and the whole time the notebook sits eighteen inches from my hand getting heavier, and I do not pick it up, because the second I close my fingers on it I have told Damien exactly how much it is worth to me, and the sleeper is leaning, leaning, wanting to open it, wanting to see what page, wanting the loose thread in her hand, and I keep my palm flat on the cold table and I make us both wait.

It is Lacey who breaks me. Not the sleeper. Lacey, leaning in to slide a printed schedule toward Naomi, her chewed lanyard swinging, knocks the corner of the notebook with the edge of the page, and it skews, and the soft cover lifts, and for one second the open spread turns toward me and I see, in the margin beside the little hand-drawn lamp, in a hand I know better than any other, not a sketch. A date. A date and a time, circled twice, the way I circle a deadline I am frightened of, in the top corner of the page, and beside it three words in my own hand that I have no memory whatsoever of writing.

I do not recognise the date. That is the thing that stops my breath, quietly, under the cello, where no one can see it. It is a date a whole season out from this borrowed morning, an ordinary autumn evening by the numbers, and I did not write it, I would remember writing on this page, this page is years old, this page is the oldest thing I own, and there is fresh ink on it. Someone has written on my notebook. Recently. In handwriting that is mine.

The three words underneath the circled time are in my hand and they are not in my memory and they say, small and certain: don't be late.

Lacey straightens the notebook back square, apologising under her breath, and the spread turns away, and the date is gone back into the closed shape of the thing, and the meeting goes on around me, and I sit with my flat hand on the cold table and a circled time I cannot place written by a hand that is mine in ink that is fresh on a page that is years old, and very quietly, almost kindly, the thing under my breastbone says: Oh. You don't remember that one yet.