The Note in Her Hand

He's not looking at me.

Elliot Sayer says it the way he says everything, mild and unhurried, a number being written down, and he says it to the dog and to the founder both, and then he tucks his folio higher under his arm and lets it lie there between us like a number he has written down and will come back to. He does not push. Men who read what does not add up for a living never push. They write it down and they wait for you to push, because the thing that does not add up always, in the end, gives itself away by trying too hard not to.

So I do not try.

"He doesn't like accountants," I say, and the cello does it warm and tired, a founder making a small joke at the end of a long day, and I bend and clip Pim's lead to his collar with hands that the dog does not run from only because the lead means a door, means out, means away from me. "I'll have IT and Damien to you by Friday, Elliot. Thank you for coming up."

"Thank you, Ms Wilde." The kind glasses. The mild smile. He turns for the lift and at the last second he glances back, not at me, at the dog, one more time, filing it, and then the doors close on the soft grey coat and he is gone down through the building with the gap in the chain already written on a page somewhere in that folio in a hand I will never see.

I get the dog into the lift and I do not get in with him. I send him down to the lobby with a security guard who looks at me like I have asked him to walk a crocodile, and the moment the doors shut on Pim's flat ears and white eye I lean my forehead on the cold steel of the lift surround and let the body shake, once, all the way through, the way it has wanted to since the window.

Then I go back into Cosima's office and I shut the door, and I check it, the way you check a stove.

And I do the thing I have been not-doing all afternoon.

Because there is a fact I have been carrying since the glass room, since Lacey knocked the notebook and the spread turned and I saw, in the margin beside my own years-old felt-tip drawing of Lantern, a date and a time circled twice in fresh ink on an old page, in my own handwriting, three words I have no memory of writing. Don't be late. The sleeper said, oh, you don't remember that one yet, and then Damien carried the notebook out under his arm and I let him, because fighting for it in front of the board was a way to lose, and I told myself I would place the date later, when I had a minute, when the building was not on fire.

The building is always on fire. There is never a minute. That is how a thing stays buried, in a life like this one. You are always running up a staircase toward a screaming dog and there is never a minute to stand still and read the one line that would tell you what you are running toward.

I make the minute.

I sit down at Cosima's desk in Cosima's chair and I open the calendar on the screen the body knows the password to, the founder's calendar, two years deep, colour-coded down to the half-hour by an assistant who learned the colours the hard way, and I do not search it. Searching is the appetite's instinct, fast, certain, founder-clean. Instead I do it the slow way, the Talia way, the junior-designer way, the way you trace a wire you do not trust: I go to the date. The date from the notebook margin. The autumn evening, a season out, the one the sleeper smiled at. I scroll the founder's calendar forward through the weeks, past the board offsite, past the Meridian signing window pencilled in provisional grey, past a hair appointment, a gala, a thing called only Dinner, P, and I land on the date and the time, and there is an entry there. Of course there is. I knew there would be. The body knew there would be. The body's hand was already lifting toward the screen before I told it to.

The entry is one word.

Talia.

Just that. My own name, in the founder's calendar, on an autumn evening a season from now, at the time circled twice in my own hand in a years-old notebook. No address. No note. No green or blue or amber to say what kind of thing it is. Cosima colour-coded everything, the woman could not buy coffee without a category, and this one entry sits uncoloured, default grey, the colour of a thing you do not want a category to remember, and it says my name and it says a time and it says nothing else.

And I sit there and I look at it, and the building goes very quiet, the after-six quiet, the cleaners not up yet, and I wait for the dread to come the way it always comes, and it does not come, and that is the worst part, because what comes instead is recognition.

I know this evening.

I do not place it the way you place a memory. I place it the way you place a smell. The body places it. Somewhere under my breastbone the appetite stirs, not hungry now, satisfied, the contentment of a thing that has been waiting for me to find the page it left out for me, and the muscle-memory unfolds the way it unfolded for the route and the espresso and the founder's signature, except this time what unfolds is not a skill. It is a plan. The body remembers a plan. The hands remember the weight of a phone telling a junior designer there is a problem with the Lantern files, can you come in, after hours, tonight, just us, no one else needs to be involved. The feet remember the cold of a stairwell that is not in this building, the riverside building, the old studio, the basement stairs. The mouth remembers the shape of a kindness it did not mean, come down, I'll meet you, bring the notebook.

Bring the notebook.

The notebook with the felt-tip drawing and the date circled twice in fresh ink on the old page in my own hand, except it was never my hand, was it, it was this hand, Cosima's hand, writing in a notebook she had logged into the archive under her own initials last week, writing a note to a woman she was going to meet in a basement, writing it on the page that proves who really made Lantern so that the proof and the maker would be in the same room at the same hour on the same grey uncoloured evening, where one of them could be made to stop existing.

Don't be late.

It is not a reminder I wrote to myself. It is the lure. It is the thing the killer tells the victim so the victim comes alone and on time. Cosima wrote it in my own old notebook in fresh ink because she is the kind of woman who would enjoy that, who would draw the trap on the same page as the genius she stole, the little artist's signature of a person who builds her whole life out of other people's work and signs it with their own pen.

The date in the calendar is the night Cosima kills me.

Since the morning I woke up dead I have been saying three months, three months out, like a fact, a flat distance, a number on the far side of a thing that already happened to me. I never once checked it against anything. You do not read the calendar on your way down a stairwell, and I could not have told anyone the exact date of my own death, only the season, only the cold, only the perfume and my own name said almost gently. I have been thinking of it backward, as the past, as the night I came from. And it is not the past. From inside this body, on this chair, in this glass tower with the river going dark, it has not happened yet. It is thirteen weeks away. It is on the calendar. It is in my own appointments, uncoloured, in the founder's grey, and the woman whose hands these are wrote the lure for it a season before she meant to use it, and then I woke up inside her, and now I am the one holding the pen.

I am the one who is going to be late, or not.

The count comes and I let it, because the dread has finally arrived and it is enormous and I will go to pieces if I do not give it edges. One: there is a night, thirteen weeks out, when the original Talia, the woman walking around out there in my old body, the woman Joss says has been off lately, not herself, is going to get a phone call from this number, from this body, asking her to come down to a basement alone after hours and bring the notebook. Two: she is going to go, because she always goes, because being asked is the only currency a person spends who has been overlooked since she was small, and she will think, finally, someone needs the real one, the actual maker, not the myth. Three: at the bottom of those stairs is the woman who built her empire out of Talia's work, and the woman who built her empire out of Talia's work is going to take the last thing Talia has, and the hands that are going to do it are warm and brief and firm and they are at the ends of my own arms, resting on the founder's desk, and they are not shaking. They are perfectly steady. They have always known the plan. They were just waiting for me to read the page.

I stand up. I do not decide to stand up. The body stands me up, satisfied, content, and the appetite under my breastbone says, quietly, fondly, in the voice that is mine and is not, there she is. You found it. Now you know what we are for.

We are not for this.

I press both hands flat on the cold glass desk, the way I press them when the hand twitches toward Damien, when the cursor slides toward Delete, and I hold the body still by main force, and I say it inside, where I have learned to say things, where no one watches: I am not going to that basement. And the sleeper, gently, with the patience of a thing that has all the time in the world and nowhere else to be, says the thing that takes the floor out from under me, the thing so far past worse that I do not understand it for a full second.

You don't have to go. You're already here.

And I understand. I understand all at once, the way you understand the step that is not there in the dark, the whole of it dropping into me in one cold piece. I have been afraid of a night a season away. I have been afraid of a basement and a phone call and a stairwell across the river. I have had it backward the entire time, the way I had the three months backward.

Because the woman who has to make that call is me.

The body knows the plan because the body intends to carry it out. The lure is already written. The date is already in the diary. The original Talia is out there on her rails, off lately, not herself, waiting, the way a thing on rails waits, for the only call it is still capable of answering. And somewhere under my hands and my breastbone and the founder's steady pulse, the woman who wrote don't be late is awake enough to set the trap and patient enough to let me sit in her chair and feel righteous about refusing to spring it, knowing what I have only just understood, looking out at me from behind my own reflection with the fond and patient and predatory interest of a thing that has finally been understood and can do nothing about it.

I am not three months from my murder.

I am the one who is going to commit it.