Turn 6 of 11

Tell her you know what you would undo, and watch what she says to that

"I know what I'd undo," you say.

Marguerite's mug stops halfway to her mouth. She sets it down again, carefully, the way someone sets down something fragile when they need both hands free — though her hands do not move after, they just stay where they are, flat on the desk, fingers slightly spread. She does not ask what. You can see the question sitting behind her teeth and she is holding it there.

"It's not a small thing," you say. "It's not a tea order. It's — someone. Someone I've known a long time. And the thing I'd change is load-bearing. I know it is. I've been telling myself all afternoon that taking out a wall isn't the same as taking out a building."

"And?" Marguerite says.

"And I don't believe me."

Marguerite nods. It is a slow nod, and it is not agreement — it is the nod of someone hearing a diagnosis they expected. She picks up a pen from the desk, not to write with, just to hold, turning it between her fingers the way someone turns a key in a lock they are not sure they want to open. The pen is black, ordinary, the kind Facilities orders in boxes of fifty. She looks at it rather than at you.

"You said load-bearing," she says. "That's the word you used."

"Yes."

"Then you already know what happens when you take out a load-bearing wall. The ceiling finds out." She sets the pen down.

"The person you're thinking of — they are the way they are because of the thing you want to remove. You know that. You've known it long enough to come down here and tell a woman you barely speak to that you're thinking of doing it anyway."

The hoover beyond the door has moved closer. Its drone is under the conversation now, a bass note that makes the room feel smaller. Marguerite's desk lamp flickers — just once, a dip in the current that old wiring does when something else on the floor cycles on — and in the half-second of dimness her face is older than it looks in the light, the lines deeper, the wear visible.

"The last person who had this keyboard," she says, and stops. She picks up the mug again, drinks — actually drinks, a long swallow, not the holding gesture from before — and sets it down empty.

"You want to know if they pressed it."

"I want to know what it cost."

Marguerite looks at you. The guard is down, or it has shifted, or she has decided that guarding will not help.

"They pressed it," she says. "They pressed it for someone they loved. And the thing they removed was load-bearing, and the ceiling came down, and the person they loved is still here but is not — they are not the person who was loved. Do you understand the difference?"

You understand the difference. It is the difference between a wall and the room the wall was holding. It is the difference between Ellis as he is and Ellis as he would be without the thing you want gone, and you do not know what that Ellis holds at arm's length, or what that Ellis has never learned to carry, or whether the carrying is the part you —

"Why me?" you say. "Why did you give it to me?"

Marguerite is quiet for a long moment. The hoover drones. The tea is finished. She looks at the keyboard on her desk, the unlabelled key half in shadow, and when she speaks her voice has dropped into something private and deliberate, the voice of someone who has decided to tell you one true thing and then stop.

"Because I recognised the look," she says. "The one you had when I handed it to you. You looked at it like you already knew what it was for. And I thought — maybe this time someone returns it before they find out what it costs. Or maybe they don't. But either way, it should be held by someone who understands what a load-bearing wall is."

She picks up the pen again. She does not write. She holds it, and waits, and the room is quiet except for the hoover and the hum of the building doing what buildings do at night, which is stand on the walls they have.