She read the page and she thought: you knew this would happen. You read about this, you understood the mechanism, you built the system to survive it. You were very afraid and you were very prepared and both of those things were true simultaneously.
The coffee table. The stack of notebooks — she had been living in the notebooks for two days. The unwashed cup that she had washed — the first thing she had done in the apartment after finding — after finding Layla on the floor. She had washed the cup. She thought about why she had washed the cup. Not to destroy evidence — she could not have been thinking about evidence at that point because she had not known who she was. She had washed the cup because the cup was dirty and she did not leave dirty cups on the table. Because whatever else had been taken from her by the night, that specific quality had survived: she was a person who washed dishes. A place for everything. Everything in its place. Even in the wreckage of herself, she had held onto the small order of things.
She moved to the kitchen. She stood at the herbs on the window ledge. Rosemary, leftmost — she knew what was there now, had touched it yesterday, the morning with hills, the beginning. She moved right. Mint — the second pot. She touched the mint. The smell was immediate and with it: a kitchen. Not hers. Someone's kitchen — a friend's apartment, Koramangala, a Sunday afternoon, people around a table, laughter, the specific domestic warmth of a day with people she loved. She could feel the people without seeing them. She could feel that Layla was not there. That the people in this kitchen were hers — not Layla's, not the circumscribed world that Layla had been gradually constructing around her. These were her own people, the ones Layla had spent three years trying to separate her from. The memory said: there were people who were yours and you did not lose them. She stood with the mint for a long time.
