She read for two more hours. Nair came and went, appeared periodically, asked specific questions about specific passages that she would read aloud from the notebook. By the end of the afternoon she had a map — not complete, not clear, but a beginning. The person who had written these notebooks was someone who had been working, for eighteen months, on the project of understanding and externalising her own memories. She had been in therapy with someone called Dr. Lata. She had been in a relationship with L that had been complicated and was now over, apparently, and the end of it had been something the notebooks referred to obliquely as "the situation." She had been building something — the notebooks made this clear — that was both private and prepared for being found. A record. An explanation. A form of insurance against the event of not being able to explain herself.
And somewhere in the later entries, as she reached them, there was a name she found. Not L's full name — but a pronoun shift that told her L was a woman. She called again. She always calls again. That's the part I've been the most wrong about — thinking that staying was the dangerous choice. The dangerous choice, I understand now, is any choice that gives her access.
She put the notebook down. She looked at the inspector, who had returned and was reading her own notes across the table.
"L was a woman," she said. "Someone the writer was afraid of." She paused. "Someone who apparently called repeatedly, who had been — there's a phrase: 'any choice that gives her access.' She was worried about this person having access. To her."
Nair looked up. The inspector's face was the face of someone who had just received a piece of information that connected to something else in her head, the specific quality of a connection being made. "We found something at the scene," she said. "In the bedroom, under the body. A key. Not a key to this apartment. A different key — different style, older lock type, old manufacturer mark." She paused. "We're running it."
