Chapter 59 Chapter 59

Chapter 59 Chapter 59
Two weeks passed the way weeks passed when you were waiting for something, faster than you wanted in some places and slower than you could bear in others.

The search was moving. Gia came to her office every two or three days with a progress note. The thread was narrowing. 

The Rahman family cross-reference had produced a secondary contact name and that name had produced an address history and the address history was being traced forward. He was careful about how much he told her at each update. 

Not evasive, she did not think Gia did evasive but measured. He gave her what was solid and held back what was not yet confirmed and she respected that even when it frustrated her.

On a Tuesday afternoon she was at her desk going through the updated chronology when Temi knocked on her open door.

"Sorry to interrupt," Temi said. "The legal team wants to know if you can confirm the date of the third quarter board dinner. The one from four years ago."

"Why do they need it."

"They have a transaction the following morning they are trying to place in context."

Nia flipped back through her notebook. "The dinner was the twenty-second. It ran late, Anthony came home after midnight, which I noted because he was home by ten-thirty most evenings."

Temi was writing quickly. "That is very specific."

"I kept notes." Nia turned the notebook back to the current page. "Everything from that period is in there. Tell them to send me the full date range they are looking at and I will cross-reference it against everything I have."

"I will." Temi hesitated at the door. "Can I ask you something?"

Nia looked up.

"Does it ever feel strange?" Temi said. "Going through all of it. Using your own memories as evidence."

Nia thought about it for a moment. "It felt strange at first," she said. "Now it just feels necessary."

Temi nodded slowly. She left.

Nia looked at the notebook in front of her. She looked at the screen, she went back to work.

But underneath the work something else had been building for days and she could feel it the way you felt a weather change before it arrived — in the pressure, in the particular quality of the air, in the way certain thoughts kept returning no matter how many times she set them aside.

Anthony's deadline was back.

He had not called. He had not messaged. He was simply there, in the background, the way he had been there in the background of her life for the past three years, a presence that did not need to announce itself because she already knew what it meant.

She opened the building layout.

She had opened it before. Several times. She had always closed it without doing anything, but today the search was close enough to feel real and the deadline was real and the pressure was different from every previous time she had sat in front of this document.

She looked at the layout for a long time.

She thought about the file. The one Anthony needed. She knew exactly which floor it was on. She knew the access route, she had mapped it in her head so many times over the past weeks that the mapping had become automatic, a thing her mind did without asking her permission.

She opened a second window. She pulled up the system.

She told herself she was just looking. That looking was not the same as doing.

She found the file.

She opened it.

She read it. It took four minutes. She closed it. She did not copy it. She did not send it. 

She closed the window and the layout and sat back in her chair with her hands in her lap and felt the cold specific quality of having done something she could not take back.

One file. Nothing sent. Nothing shared but she had opened it, she had read it. She had done it for the reason she had told herself she would never give Anthony and that reason was that the mother search was close and the deadline was real and for four minutes she had been the person Anthony needed her to be.

She sat with that.

Temi knocked again at half past four. "The legal team says thank you for the date," she said through the doorway. "And they want to know if." She stopped. She looked at Nia's face. "Are you all right?"

"Yes," Nia said. "What do they want to know."

Temi looked at her for a moment longer than was strictly necessary. "They want to know if you have any notes from the two weeks around the sixteenth of October. Same year."

"I will have it to them by end of day." Nia picked up her pen. "Close the door on your way out."

Temi pulled the door closed.

Nia sat alone.

She opened a blank document on her laptop. She typed out exactly what she had done — the layout, the file, the four minutes, the closing of the window. She read it back. She thought about sending it to Xavier.

She thought about not sending it. She thought about the difference between being caught and coming forward and what each of those looked like and what each of them cost.

She closed the document without saving it.

She picked up her pen and found the October page in her notebook and wrote out the dates the legal team had asked for. She sent it through, she looked at the clock. It was twenty past five. The floor was thinning out.

Her phone rang. It was Sophia.

"Are you still at the office?" Sophia said.

"Yes."

"Come home." A pause. "You sound like something is sitting on you."

Nia looked at the blank document she had not saved. She looked at the window she had closed. "I am finishing something," she said. "I will be there in an hour."

"I will put food on at seven."

"Thank you."

She ended the call. She sat at her desk for another ten minutes without moving. Then she packed her bag and turned off her laptop and stood up.

She walked to the lift. She pressed the button. The lift took longer than usual and in the wait she thought about whether she was going to tell Xavier or not and did not arrive at an answer.

The doors opened. She got in.

She went home.

She sat across from Sophia at the kitchen table and ate the food Sophia had made and answered the questions Sophia asked about her day with the partial truths that were becoming, she noticed, something of a habit. Sophia looked at her once, carefully, in the specific way she had, and did not push.

After dinner Nia washed the dishes and said goodnight and went to her room and lay on the bed with the light on and thought about what she had done.

She did not sleep well. She lay in the dark and thought about the file and the four minutes and the specific feeling of knowing exactly what you did and exactly why you did it and not being able to make either of those things untrue.