They gave her a room, not a cell.
This distinction mattered in the way that small distinctions mattered when you had no framework for anything larger — a room with a table and two chairs and a window, a cup of filter coffee that someone had brought without being asked, which told her something about either the police station's culture or the specific kindness of whoever had made it. She sat with the notebook and the coffee and she did not know where to start, so she started at the beginning, which was what the last line in the notebook had said to do.
The beginning was the first page.
The handwriting was consistent throughout — the same handwriting as the date labels in the fridge, the same hand that had written the final line that had told her to start here. Dense, slanting slightly right, the writing of someone who thought faster than their hand and had adapted by compressing their letters rather than slowing down their thoughts. She read it.
The first entry was dated eighteen months ago. It said: Starting this because Dr. Lata says I should externalise. She says my memory palace — the one in my head — is a private space and private spaces can become prisons if you stop coming out of them. So. This is coming out. This notebook is the externalised version of the palace. If I can put the memories here, outside me, maybe I can look at them without— The sentence stopped. The next sentence, on the next line, started a new thought: The apartment is the palace. It has always been the palace. That's why it's arranged the way it is. Every room is a locus, every object is a memory. I didn't do this consciously, at first. I understood it later.
