The lake skims low enough to show the teeth beneath it. Wind knocks the surface into scales, and the dam upstream carves the level like a mood. I drive past donor houses lit like galleries and park at the Annex after hours. Fluorescent lines buzz above me; the air carries that courthouse mix—antiseptic, fax toner, and old carpet that drank too many monologues. I tuck the manila envelope deeper under my arm and taste metal from the key I clench between my molars.
Tamsin waits in a conference nook that the county forgot to make warm. “You brought the barley of truth,” she says, eyeing the envelope.
“I brought receipts,” I say, setting the stack down. “Screenshots of the access logs. The rider from the clinic. The redlined minutes with Hale’s line. Mailbox store cashier slip, PO box number circled. I even printed the bracelet EULA.”
She taps her fountain pen on the table, three clicks like a metronome for courage. “Laptop, firewall on. Phone in airplane. No smart speakers?”
“I left the house’s ears humming to themselves,” I say. “I walked.”
She nods. We sit shoulder to shoulder in the fluorescent noon of night. I lay the stack between us: each sheet a small blade. The rider’s rook watermark shows when I tilt the page; the board minutes glow with tracked changes and the time stamp 12:04 PM like a courthouse bell.
“You got the rider image clean?” she asks.
“Copied at the clinic,” I say. “And when the copier jammed, I photographed every jammed inch. Metadata intact. I did not touch the originals.”
Tamsin warms her hands on a paper cup of coffee that smells like dark chocolate and burnt optimism. “Then we authenticate, we package, and we hash.”
“I want a ritual,” I say. “I want the paper to know I mean it.”
She opens her laptop, launches the checksum tool, and nods toward the scanner. “Scan, then hash. We’ll notarize the hash, not the content, to avoid chain-of-custody arguments. It’s cleaner.”
I feed pages. The scanner’s lamp makes each sheet into a brief sunrise: Dependents/, continuation of care, do not 1099, variables hidden, brand risk: spouses. I breathe through my molars and pretend my hands aren’t shaking.
“You’re steady,” Tamsin says without looking. “Steady is ninety percent of admissibility.”
“The other ten?”
“Ink,” she says. “And nerve.”
The last page feeds with a sound like a zipper closing. Tamsin drags the folder into the hashing window and we watch a progress bar cross the desert. The tool spits out a string that looks like an incantation no priest should trust.
“Read it to me,” she says.
I read each block aloud, groupings of four and five, careful to pronounce the letters like a pharmacist. When I finish, my tongue feels upholstered in static.
“Again,” she says, and I do. She verifies each segment against the screen and prints the string on a thermal label. The office fills with the faint sweet-bitter smell of new glue.
“We need it on the envelope seams,” she says, tearing the label into lengths. “And we need your ink crossing them.”
I press the sticky hash along the V and W of the manila mouth, the corners, the spine. I take my pen—red, fine tip—and sign my name across every join. Lena Calder floats, then anchors. I date each signature and add the time. My hand cramps; the pain feels like honesty.
Micro-hook #1 knots itself under my sternum: If anyone opens this, my name breaks, and the break testifies.
We trade places. Tamsin adds her initials at each seam and stamps a notary seal on a separate affidavit where the hash lives in black letters like a new species. The seal presses through the page—raised, stern, a blind coin.
“Now the cloud,” she says, pushing the laptop to me. “You set the permissions. I’ll watch.”
“He lives with my passwords,” I say. “I live with his cameras.”
“Then create a key he hasn’t imagined,” she says. “Name the folder something so boring he will die before he clicks it.”
I type Quarterly_Estimated_Taxes into a new directory and bury it inside Records > Household > Receipts > 2019–2021. I set the link to read-only for a dummy share and add a rule: if I don’t check in by e-mail at two intervals, the folder forwards to three addresses—Tamsin, my mother’s old Yahoo, and a law school friend who owes Tamsin favors. I schedule the check-ins for the morning after donor salons; those nights Julian sleeps on praise and leaves me space.
“Dead man’s switch?” Tamsin asks.
“Dead woman,” I say, mouth dry. “Yes. Two strikes triggers send. Third strike publishes to a burner blog with no analytics. It autodeletes comments.”
“Add a delay,” she says. “Twenty-four hours on the blog drop. Give me time to triage, to seal what needs sealing for court. But leave the threat visible for anyone who audits you.”
I add the delay. I take a breath that smells like toner—the kind of smell that made my mother’s hospital badge feel like armor when I was a kid doing homework at the nurses’ station.
“What about your house?” she asks.
“I made decoy folders labeled Taxes in the pantry server,” I say. “They’re bloated with scanned coupons from 2009 and mislabeled W-2s that never belonged to us. If he goes there, he’ll think I’m losing my edge.”
She smiles with one side of her mouth. “He already thinks you belong to him. Losing edges is the story he tells.”
“I’m regrinding them,” I say, uploading the PDF package and the hash affidavit. The progress wheel spins. The room hums. Somewhere in the Annex, a cleaning cart chirps and a vacuum eats someone else’s dirt.
Tamsin leans forward and drops her voice. “We’re building a story that reads aloud in court. That means integrity, timestamps, minimal adjectives. No stray jokes.”
“So no ‘womb-as-dashboard’ in the exhibit title,” I say.
“Keep that for closing argument,” she says, then softens. “You did well.”
“I feel like a museum registrar,” I say. “Curating what hurt.”
“Donor salons curated harm long before you labeled it,” she says, signing a cover sheet. “They live-caption toasts so nobody misquotes the worship. We can caption this.”
Micro-hook #2 lifts its head: If they designed a world where being unmeasured is a sin, my receipts become her oxygen.
We print a simple table of contents: A1: Access Logs (Dependents Folder Thumb); A2: Confidentiality Rider, Clinic; A3: Board Minutes (Redline); A4: Mailbox Store Receipt & Box Number; A5: EULA Excerpts (Reproductive Insights). Each line with date, time, source, hash of individual file. We affix tiny rook stickers to the copies we will keep at home—not as decoration, but as a private reminder: control disguised as strategy. I will look at those rooks and remember which way the board is slanted.
“Offsite,” Tamsin says, holding up two slim drives. “One to my storage unit. One to yours.”
“My unit is the swimming locker at the community center,” I say. “Nobody inventories wet towels.”
“Charming,” she says. “We’ll put the drive in a bag of dried lentils.”
“I was thinking barley,” I say, and we both laugh too sharply, like clinking glass that wants to crack.
We pack the manila. I run my finger along the sealed edge, feeling ink ridges where my name crosses glue. Tamsin slides the envelope into a heavier mailer and heat-seals it; the plastic wrinkles and tightens with a smell that reminds me of new shower curtains and hospital IV lines.
“Chain-of-custody log?” she asks.
I pull my spiral from my bag and write: Exhibit A compiled [time], Annex conference room B, witnesses: LR, TR. Hash: [string]. I leave a space and write a margin note that tastes like copper: Failure state: meds cut. I draw a small rook in the corner and put a red X through it.
“He gave you a bracelet,” Tamsin says gently, noticing the indentation on my wrist where I’ve been pressing my thumb.
“It’s charging in a drawer,” I say. “I read the EULA out loud like scripture. It wants to bless my uterus with insights.”
Her eyebrow climbs. “We’ll need screenshots of the permissions.”
“Already in A5,” I say. “Administrator QA can review outliers.”
“Outlier, singular,” she says, and I watch a shadow pass over her face, not fear, just arithmetic. “That’s you.”
“Not if I keep writing,” I say. “Paper counts me differently.”
She gathers everything with the neatness she keeps for trial: clips squared, tabs aligned, staples like stitches. “We’re one subpoena away from daylight,” she says.
The sentence hangs in the fluorescent air like a bridge drawn across a ravine. My chest tightens; the good kind. “Who serves it?” I ask. “And to whom?”
“We don’t choose the first names,” she says. “We only choose preparation.”
The Annex doors burp us into night. The wind pushes lake breath up the hill; ozone razors my nostrils, and I catch a wet hint of algae and stone. Streetlights lay chessboard squares across the parking lot. A drone hums somewhere, delivery or surveillance or both. I hug the mailer to my sternum and feel my pulse step down.
“Don’t drive home slowly,” Tamsin says by my car. “Drive normally. Normal is harder to narrate.”
“I checked the HOA listserv,” I say. “They’re busy fining a woman for strolling with twins on a ‘child-neutral’ sidewalk. Nobody watches the Annex exits tonight.”
“Your sarcasm is showing,” she says, approving. “Text me when the dead man check-in is set.”
“Dead woman,” I say again and close my door. The car smells faintly of rain-damp upholstery and the coffee I didn’t finish. The manila rides shotgun in a tote labeled TAXES in neat block letters. If anyone peeks, they’ll curse and look away.
Back at the Glass House, the cedar breath waits by the door like a maître d’, and the pantry’s LEDs blink once—living punctuation. I set the tote on the counter, open my laptop with a towel over the camera, and verify the upload. The cloud shows a tiny green checkmark that means finished in this one corner but never finished anywhere that matters.
I build the decoy: subfolders named Receipts with scans of grocery slips, HOA letters about “child-neutral amenities,” and a PDF of donor salon menus with live-captioned toast timings. I duplicate the EULA excerpts and rename the file Citrus Recipes. The work makes me feel petty and clean.
I take the second drive and slide it into a Ziploc of barley. I tuck the bag into my swim duffel and drop in a towel that smells like chlorine and lake. I lace the zipper pull through a rook-shaped keychain I found in a drawer once, a leftover corporate favor. I let the rook watch me the way it always has while pretending it’s just a cute piece.
Micro-hook #3 leans into my ear: If the house finds my pack, the barley reads as lunch. If the board finds my pack, the barley reads as proof.
I stand at the window and watch the lake grind its stones. The bracelet’s blue LED glows in the drawer like a low, patient heartbeat. My phone pings: Foundry Gala: Tonight’s Live-Caption Link & Donor Remarks. I don’t click. I already know the script.
Instead I text Tamsin: Dead woman switch configured. Delay set. Offsite tomorrow.
She sends back a rook emoji and a period. The punctuation looks like a door I can’t open yet.
I open my spiral and write: Exhibit A complete. Hash printed. Seams signed. Cloud set to fail on my silence. Then I draw a small bench at the edge of a low lake and write beside it: Who else is counting me—and what happens when I decide to count back out loud?