She read for three hours without stopping.
The notebooks — she counted them now, eight in the stack, spanning eighteen months — were not a single document. They were a system. Each notebook had a colour-coded spine and each colour corresponded to a different function: the green notebooks were theoretical, the work of understanding the memory palace project. The blue notebooks were practical — what each object in the apartment corresponded to, the map of the palace. The red notebooks were the record she had been most afraid to keep: the relationship with L.
She went to the red notebooks.
L was Layla.
She found the name in the third red notebook, fifteen months ago: Layla called again. I have stopped saying "L" in these pages because using just the initial was a way of making her smaller than she actually is. She is not small. Layla Menon is not small. She is — I have to be accurate about this because accuracy is the project — she is someone I loved completely and who used that completely, the way you use a resource, the way you use something that has no power to stop being used.
She read this three times. Layla Menon. She held the name in her mind and turned it over and it produced the rosemary feeling — the weight of something behind an inaccessible door, the sense of mass. She kept reading.
The story emerged slowly, the way stories in private notebooks emerged — not in chronological order, not in the way you told a story to someone else, but in the way you worked through something you were not sure you understood. Layla Menon had been — what? Friend, partner, the word shifted through the notebooks. They had met through work, it seemed — something in the tech world where Rohini worked. They had been close for three years. Then something had changed. The notebooks described the change in the specific language of someone who was carefully, deliberately naming something they had spent a long time not naming: The thing I have been calling "difficult" and "complicated" and "her way of showing she cares" — I understand now what it actually is. I have been reading about it because understanding it in the abstract makes it possible to identify it in the specific.
There was a list. The list was in the precise handwriting of someone who had thought very carefully about each item before writing it down. It was a list of specific behaviours, specific incidents, specific things that had happened over three years that Rohini had been filing under different explanations and had now reread under the correct explanation and found that the correct explanation was: control. Not love, or not only love. Control.
