She went to the bathroom. This was the first time she had been in the bathroom — she had been avoiding the private spaces, the spaces that felt most intimate, the spaces where the sense of intrusion was strongest. The bathroom was the opposite of what she had been telling herself it would be. It was not a stranger's bathroom. It had the specific organisation of her bathroom. She stood in the doorway and looked at the shelf above the sink: the specific arrangement of a morning routine, items in the order they were used, left to right as the day progressed. She knew the order. She knew it the way she knew the weight of the scarf.
She went to the mirror.
She had not properly looked at herself since the police station bathroom, where she had looked briefly, inventorially, the checking of a person taking stock. Now she looked. She looked at her face — dark hair, darker than Rohini Sharma's in the photographs, pulled back now in the loose way of someone who had woken up and had not attended to it. The face of a woman in her mid-thirties, features that were — she looked at them and felt the specific dissociation of looking at something familiar and unfamiliar simultaneously. She knew this face the way she knew the apartment. She did not know it the way she knew herself.
She looked at her face and she thought: this is the face I have always had.
She looked at her face and she thought: is it?
She went back to the notebooks. The blue notebooks — the practical ones, the map of the palace. Each object in the apartment was listed, and beside each object, a code: a number and a letter, which she understood was the address of the memory associated with the object. The system was meticulous — the work of someone who had spent eighteen months building an external version of their own mind because the internal version was under threat. Because someone was trying to make her doubt it. Because the best defence against someone who wanted to make you doubt your own memory was to put your memory somewhere they couldn't touch it.
She found the entry for the scarf: Red silk scarf on door hook — L, 3.4. Coorg, November. First time I understood. Note: not mine. Not for keeping. Return when possible.
