Nair wrote in her notebook. Rohini watched her write and thought about the night before last. The conversation in the bedroom. Layla's composed face. Something she had said — the key, Layla had said something about the key. About her mother. About access. The words were not there yet but the shape of them was: Layla had used the key as a demonstration. Look what I can get. Look how far my reach goes. Look at what you cannot protect.
And something had happened after that. Something that the palace still had, filed in the bedroom, in the locus she had not yet been able to fully enter. Something that she was going to have to go back to the apartment to find.
"Amma," she said. "I'm going to get it back. I'm going to get — myself back." She looked at her mother. "I didn't know who I was for two days. I'm finding it. I need one more thing."
"What do you need?" her mother said.
"Tell me something about me," she said. "Something specific. Something that only you would know."
Her mother looked at her for a moment. Then: "You always rearranged your bookshelf when you were anxious," she said. "Not randomly — you had a system, but the system changed depending on what you needed. When you were frightened you organised by comfort. When you were angry you organised by complexity. When you were working through something you couldn't name yet, you organised by what you needed to understand next." She paused. "I used to check the shelf when you were a child, to know how you were."
She looked at her mother. She thought about the bookshelves in her apartment — the system she had installed and that she had known was her system when she saw it. She thought about what the system was right now, in this moment of her life, what category she had been unconsciously organising toward in the months of building the palace. She thought about the memory science books in the middle of the third shelf, the theoretical foundation, the research she had done to understand what was happening to her.
She had organised the shelves by what she needed to understand. She had been working through something she couldn't name yet. For eighteen months, she had been building the map that would bring her back to herself.
She stood up. "I have to go back to the apartment," she said. "I'm almost there."
