Ten Days
The box room, Kovač flat
The box room was the smallest room in the flat and had never had a bed in it, only a bed frame propped against the wall since a move nobody could remember. The rest of it was suitcases and a hoover and boxes that had been repacked so many times nobody knew what was in them.
The pages were in a shoebox under the frame, with a bank card that had expired and a photograph of Wren’s mother on a bridge somewhere.
They were folded once, along the middle, which was how her father folded everything.
Wren sat on the floor of the box room for a long time before she opened them. When she did, they were just what they were. Times. Mileage. A destination column with a road written in it in his handwriting, three days running, and the word waited in the margin.
She hadn’t cried. She’d put them in a plastic wallet, because paper that old goes at the folds, and she’d put the wallet in her bag.
Then she’d rung June and said she’d come to the office after work.
Alcántara House, sixth floor
June’s floor was open plan and grey and had the kind of carpet that makes no sound. It was almost empty. There was a woman on the far side eating at her desk with headphones on, and everything else was chairs.
“You came,” June said, and stood up too quickly, and then didn’t seem to know what the standing was for.
“Said I would.”
“You did say. You always do.” Her phone went on the desk between them, buzzing. “Ignore that.”
“It’s your work.”
“It’s Beckmann. He’s discovered I exist in the evenings.” June looked at it, and then picked it up, and made a face that was meant to be funny. “One minute. Genuinely one minute. Don’t go anywhere.”
“Wasn’t going to.”
“There’s a chair. It’s a terrible chair, but it is structurally a chair.”
She went out into the corridor, saying no, absolutely, I completely understand in the voice she used for men like that.
Wren stayed standing.
She didn’t sit in the chair. She didn’t put her bag down, or take her coat off, or touch the edge of the desk, because she had spent her whole working life in other people’s rooms and you learn to keep your hands where everyone can see them.
June’s laptop was open on the desk, angled towards her empty chair. She had gone out to the corridor mid-sentence with the phone against her shoulder and had not shut the lid.
Wren was not looking for it. That was the part she’d go over afterwards, again and again, for weeks. She had not been looking for anything.
It was a document, and it was open, and her father’s initials were in it.
She read it standing up.
Dates on the left. Sources on the right. Some lines in black and some in grey, and a few rows shaded. Under the last row, a line. Under the line, one sentence.
Don’t tell W until I have the pages.
Wren looked at the top of the window.
Files tell you things. That was her whole job. She read the dates without deciding to — created, last saved — and the numbers went in and sat down.
Created ten days ago. Added to ever since.
She stood in an office she had not been invited into and did the arithmetic anyway, because the arithmetic was all there was.
Ten days ago was the day after her mother’s funeral.
That day. The day June had come up to the systems floor with a bag of food and stayed until four in the morning.
She had made the file, and then she had come up here. Or she had come up here, and gone home, and made the file. Wren stood in an office on the sixth floor trying to work out which order she wanted it to be in, and could not find a version that helped.
And then, in the days after, June had answered messages. Asked how the flat was. Written I’m not asking about anything else, not now, not for a long time.
The stairwell, then the bridge
She was on the stairs before she understood she was leaving.
She took them fast, all the way down, and at the bottom the security man said goodnight and she said goodnight back in a completely normal voice, which she would also think about later.
Outside it had got cold. She walked as far as the footbridge by the station and stood in the middle of it with her hands on the rail, over four sets of track and a line of stationary carriages with their lights still on.
There were two things, and they wouldn’t stack.
The first was that her father had driven a road three times and written waited in the margin, and that everything in her bag was true, and that the man who came home and put his keys in the bowl had done it.
She had known that since the funeral home. She had held it off with both hands and it had come in anyway.
The second thing was newer and it was worse, and she turned it over on the bridge until it fit.
June had known. And had gone on asking.
Not once. Not in a moment of weakness at a kitchen table.
She had stood in that yard first. She had crossed the gravel and fixed a collar and put her hand round Wren’s wrist in a crowd and held on for longer than she needed to.
And the next day she had gone home and opened a document and typed MK under a date.
And then she had made herself a note about the order to do things in, and gone on asking.
Wren took her phone out and looked at it.
One more thing. The last one.
She put it face-down on the rail, which is a stupid thing to do with a phone on a bridge, and stood with her hand flat on top of it.
She had said yes before June finished asking. Every single time. She had been so proud of that, in a way she’d never admitted to anybody — of being the one who didn’t need the reasons.
Wren stopped in the doorway of June’s office and didn’t come in.
The floor was empty. Somewhere down the corridor a cleaner’s cart went by and kept going, and neither of them looked at it.
“You can sit down,” June said.
“No.”
June’s laptop was still open behind her, turned round on the desk so the screen faced the wall. She had done that when she heard the lift.
Wren looked at the back of the lid.
She had stood in front of that screen an hour ago. She knew every line on it, and the date at the top of it, and what June had typed under the rule at the bottom.
And June had turned it away. Which meant that even now, standing here, June still thought there was something left that Wren hadn’t seen.
“Wren—“
“That night.” Wren’s voice was flat and careful. “In the systems room. When you were asleep.”
June didn’t say anything.
“Did you already know.”
There was an answer. June had been building it for weeks, the way she built everything, with the reasons in order and a soft place at the end for the other person to land.
She opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
Wren nodded, slowly, like something had just been confirmed. Then she picked her bag up off the floor and left.
She was at the lift when June got to the door.
“Wren. Please.”
“Don’t follow me down.”
“I’m not going to explain it. I’m going to tell you what’s in the file and you can—“
“I read the file.”
June stopped.
“I read all of it,” Wren said. “I read the date on it as well.”
“Let me—“
“You started it the day after we buried her.” Wren pressed the button again, which does nothing, which everybody knows. “Which means you were already looking at him while we were still in that yard. You stood there and let those men tell you how sorry they were, and you were already looking at him.”
“Wren—“
“You fixed my collar.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t say yes like it’s brave.”
The lift came. Wren got into it and turned round.
“And don’t do the door thing,” she said. “Not tonight. Not the if you’d rather not. I’ve had years of it and I liked it and I’m not having it tonight.”
June stood in the corridor with her hand out towards the frame, not touching it.
“I have them,” Wren said. “The pages. They’re in my bag.”
The lift doors started to close and June put her hand between them and they opened again, and neither of them moved.
“Wren.”
“You’ll get them,” Wren said. “But not because you asked.”
She took June’s hand off the door, by the wrist, carefully, the way you move something that isn’t yours, and put it back on her side of the gap.
Then the doors closed.