"The herbs on the kitchen window." She went to the kitchen. The herbs were in small pots: basil, mint, rosemary, curry leaf, one she didn't immediately name. Each pot was in a specific position on the ledge. "Each herb is a — in memory palace theory, you associate objects with specific memories. She would have assigned each of these to something. The position matters." She touched the rosemary pot — leftmost, the first one. Something happened in her chest when she touched it. Not memory, not yet. Something before memory, the physical register of a thing that had been filed somewhere she could not currently access. She took her hand away.
"What happened just now?" Nair said. She had seen it — the slight change in her face, the withdrawal of the hand.
"Something is there," she said. "Connected to that plant. I can feel it but I can't — it's like knowing a word in a language you haven't used in a long time. You know it's there. You can almost say it." She turned around and faced the living room from the kitchen threshold. "Inspector. The apartment doesn't feel like someone else's home. It feels like—" She stopped. She was very careful about the next part. "It feels like mine."
Nair was very still. "Explain that."
"I know where things are. I know why they're arranged as they are. When I look at the bookshelves I don't see the shelves of a stranger — I see a system that makes sense to me, not because I'm reading it, but because I installed it." She looked at Nair directly. "I think I have been in this apartment so often, for so long, that I have absorbed its logic as my own. Or—" She stopped. The edge of the thing was very close. "Or there's another explanation."
"What is the other explanation?" Nair said. Her voice was very even.
"I don't know yet," she said. "I need to keep reading the notebooks."
She spent the morning going through the apartment systematically. She did not do this because Nair told her to — Nair watched, took notes, asked periodic questions, but the work was her own. She went through the apartment the way the notebook had described: room by room, object by object, attending to the feeling that each object produced in her. Some objects produced nothing. Others produced the rosemary feeling — the sense of something filed behind an inaccessible door, the particular quality of weight that meant there was something there, something she had known, something she had put away or that had been put away and was waiting.
