She stood in the bedroom for the third time, and this time she did not stop at the doorway.
She came in. She sat on the edge of the bed — the bed she had slept in for four years, the specific mattress she had chosen after much deliberation, the headboard she had refinished herself one Sunday with a sanding block and the wrong kind of paint and then the right kind. She sat on her bed in her bedroom in her apartment and she let the palace open around her, room by room, in the order it was meant to be walked, and she waited for the bedroom to give her the night.
Nair was in the living room. She had asked for this — time alone in the bedroom, the room that was the deepest locus, the room that held the most. Nair had said yes and had meant it, and she could hear the inspector moving quietly in the living room, the specific quality of someone who was present without imposing their presence.
She closed her eyes. She put her hands flat on the bed — on the fabric she had chosen, on the surface she had woken up on every morning for four years. She let the room be the room.
The first thing that came was not the night. It was earlier — weeks before. A decision she had made. The decision to stop waiting for Layla to stop and to start preparing for what came next. She had been reading — the memory science books, the trauma literature, the accounts of women who had documented what happened to them because documentation was the only defence available when the person threatening you was very good at making herself invisible. She had built the palace more deliberately in those weeks. She had gone room by room, object by object, and she had made sure everything was in its place. She had written the last line in the notebook — the line for herself, if herself was not available. She had been very afraid and very prepared.
Then the night itself began to come.
