Not Herself Lately

"My guest," I say, and the cello takes it before I can decide whether to let it, smooth, unbothered, a founder naming a thing she has already handled, "is leaving. We're done."

We are not done. The ledger is still glowing on the laptop between us, the COO's discretionary line, four months of it, and Damien Wilde can read it upside down as fast as I can read it the right way up, because it is his work, his shell, his three same-day flow-throughs, and the smile that stopped on his mouth has not started again. He is standing in my open door with his coat still on, which means he came up the moment someone told him the founder had taken the dead junior's sister into the office and shut the door, which means someone watches that door for him, which is a thing I will have to count later, in a room where my sister cannot hear me count.

Joss has not moved. Joss is reading him read the screen, and Joss is clever, my sister has been clever since she was six, and I watch her file the way his eyes went to the laptop before they went to her face. A man meeting a stranger looks at the stranger. Damien looked at the ledger.

"Who's the guest, Cosima," he says again, easy, like the first time was a courtesy and the second is the actual question. "Because she looks like trouble, and you don't keep trouble in your office with the door shut. You hand trouble to me."

"This is Joss," I say. The chest-voice wants the surname, wants to put Frost in the room like a blade, and I do not let it, because the second Damien hears Frost beside that screen he will know exactly which name he has been washing his money through and exactly who has come asking, and a man who has built a four-month fraud through a woman's identity does not need to be told the woman has a sister who pulls bank statements. So I give him a first name and nothing under it. "A friend of the family. She had a complaint. I'm dealing with it."

It is a lie, a clean one, the founder's kind, and I hate the ease of it in my mouth, and under my breastbone the appetite stirs at the ease, fond, because lying well is the body's native tongue and I have just spoken it fluently to protect my sister and the body cannot tell the difference between protecting Joss and being Cosima. I take my mouth back before it can offer a second sentence.

"A complaint," Damien says.

"About a charge," I say. "Billing. You know how it is. People see a company name on a statement they don't recognise and they assume the worst."

The room goes very quiet. I have done it on purpose, the way I named the cold storage aloud in front of Meridian, the way Talia has only ever had one weapon, which is to say the true thing in the room where it costs the guilty most, and I have just said statement and charge and company name out loud to the man who put a company name on my sister's statement, and I watch it land. It lands the way I knew it would, because I have spent two years in this body learning to read this man, the body learned him before I did, and the tell is small and it is real: his hand, the one not holding the phone, goes flat against his thigh. He is steadying it. Damien Wilde, who steadied nothing in two years, is standing in my doorway with one hand pressed flat to keep it from doing what hands do when the floor moves.

Good, says the sleeper, soft, almost proud, and it is not my thought and it fits in my chest like it is, look at him hold still. He learned that from us.

I press my own palms flat to the cold edge of the desk. Two bodies in this office holding their hands still over the same dirty account, and more of us in the room than that: the woman whose name is on it, who is across the river and does not know; the man who wrote it; the face that approved it all by never once asking; and the thing under my breastbone that approves of him even now. I do not count this one. It is not a count I can survive out loud.

"What charge," Joss says.

Damien's eyes go to her, finally, properly, the founder having declined to hand him the trouble, and I see him do the arithmetic I have just done, because he is not stupid, greedy is not stupid, and I see him reach the edge of it, a friend of the family, a complaint, a billing charge she does not recognise, in the founder's office, with the disbursement ledger open, and I see the question form behind his pleasant face, which one is she. And there is exactly one move that takes the question off his face before it becomes a name, and it is a cruelty, and I make it.

"A subscription," I say, to Joss, brisk, bored, the founder closing a small matter. "One of ours, billed under a partner account, the kind of thing that catches people out. I'll have finance reverse it and write you a note. You didn't need to come all this way." I stand. I make the body do the thing the body is for. "Damien will see you down."

I watch my sister's face. I have just dismissed her, in front of the man, the way Cosima dismisses everyone, the way the founder ends a person, and it is the cruellest sentence I have built since the last one I built, your sister, and Joss hears the dismissal and behind it, because she is mine and reads me the way she read me at six, she hears the other one, the thing the cello cannot keep out of the chest, which is go, go now, get out of this room before this man learns your name. She does not know that is what she is hearing. She thinks she is hearing the enemy be the enemy. But her chin comes up, the not-to-be-moved tilt, and she looks at me one beat too long, and she does not give Damien her surname either.

"I'll find my own way down," Joss says. "I've taken up enough of your important day."

And she leaves, the worn boots on the founder's carpet, and the clip in her hair sliding, and she does not look at Damien on the way past, she looks at me, and the look says we are not done, you and I, and she is right, and I will have to find out before she does what those payments are, except I already know what they are, and the part I do not know is how I keep her alive long enough for it to matter.

The door closes behind her. And now it is the two of us, and the ledger, and the man who built it, and the founder who, as far as he has ever known, signed off on a world where he could.

"Charming friend," Damien says. The hand has come off his thigh. The smile is back. The smile is the worst thing he does, the smile is how I know I am in danger, because Damien only smiles when he has finished being afraid and started deciding. "I didn't realise you'd taken up charity."

"I didn't realise," I say, and I let the body do it, I let the cello carry the line because the line needs the cold the body has and I do not, "you'd taken up consultancy." I turn the laptop a half-inch, not toward him, just enough that he knows I know it is there, the way you move a thing on a table to tell a man you have seen it. "Four months. A shell with a sweet name. In, and out the same afternoon, three times. Out of a line I control and have apparently never once read, because the woman in this chair trusted you, Damien, and I am beginning to understand that she should not have."

It is the truest false sentence I own. She should not have. The woman in this chair, the woman whose hand I steal to sign things, was your other half, you were two faces of the same theft, and the only reason I can stand here and indict you is that I am not her, I only wear her, and you will never know that the indictment is real because the woman saying it is real.

For a moment he says nothing. The river light is grey behind him. And then he does the thing I should have seen coming, because pragmatic men do not get caught and fold, they get caught and find the soft thing in you to press, and he says it gently, almost kindly, the way you tell someone a hard truth for their own good.

"You've been off, Cos," he says. "Since before the weekend, and getting worse. Lacey's noticed. Naomi's noticed. You film a documentary and forget your own origin story. You gut a studio you've spent years refusing to set foot in. You take a stranger into your office and shut the door. And now you're reading my ledgers like you've never seen a discretionary line, like you don't remember the conversation we had about exactly this, about keeping a quiet name on the books for exactly the kind of cleanup we agreed was coming." He tilts his head. The smile is patient. "You're not yourself lately. Everyone's saying it. And I'd hate, I would genuinely hate, for the board to start wondering whether the founder is well enough to sign the things she signs. Right before the deal closes."

And the floor goes, because he has just told me three things in one breath and only meant to tell me one. He has told me he will call me mad to the board if I move on the skim. That is the one he meant. But under it, the body has already heard the other two, and the body has gone still the way it goes still when the sleeper leans toward the surface to listen, and the cold recognition is back under my breastbone, no want in it, only that terrible clean knowing, the way you know your own handwriting, because Damien said the conversation we had, the cleanup we agreed was coming, the quiet name we agreed to keep on the books, and I do not have that memory, I have never had that memory, but something in this chest just nodded, and the sleeper says it, low, certain, not guessing this time, remembering: yes. The riverside one. We chose her name together. He just doesn't know what for yet.

I stand in my enemy's office in my enemy's skin and I understand, all the way down, for the first time, that the name on those three payments is not a coincidence Damien stumbled into. Cosima gave it to him. The same name, the same junior, the same quiet woman nobody would look at, for the skim and for the stairs, chosen once, used twice, and the second use is still weeks away and the man in my doorway is laundering money through a murder he does not know is coming, and nobody living knows both halves but me, and I am the woman who, on paper, chose her.

"Get out of my office, Damien," I say, and it comes out plain, the chest-voice, the unspent one, and I cannot afford to spend it and I cannot stop it.

He goes. He is smiling. At the door he turns, and he looks at me the way you look at a problem you have decided is solvable, and he says, light, friendly, "Get some rest, Cos. You look like you've seen a ghost." And he is gone, and I am alone with the ledger and the grey light and the two of us in this chest, and somewhere eleven floors down my sister is walking out of the building carrying a question, and somewhere across the river there is a quiet body on rails answering a phone that has not rung yet, and I realise I am holding my own two hands up in front of my face, turning them, looking for whose they are, and I cannot tell, and the worst of it, the new worst of it, the thing that puts me down into the founder's chair with no legs left to argue, is that I am not sure the hand that gave Damien the name was ever only hers.