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1. 1972
“Statement ends, I suppose. Bothersome to have it end so abruptly, but as this postscript says, the fire alarm went off, and Miss Peterson did not return. That would account for the water damage, if the sprinklers were activated. And given the subject’s documented experience, it is no surprise that she would be especially wary of threats of fire. I’ll ask Fiona to follow up, but I don’t need her to push. The meandering nature of the statement leads me to believe that we won’t get anything more helpful from her, even if we do manage to reach her. Recording ends.”
Gertrude pressed “stop” on the tape recorder not a moment before the door to the archive opened. “Hello?”
She’d never seen the man who stepped through, but that in itself wasn’t odd; the Institute regularly hired recent university graduates, and she was sure she hadn’t met all of the most recent hires yet. No, the odd thing about him was the worn (and, possibly, slightly bloody) trench coat that he wore over his crisp shirt and tie. The combination meant he was dressed both better and worse than the dress code required.
“Can I help you?” she said, carefully neutral.
“Thanks,” he said, “I know where it is.” Without breaking his stride, the young man continued on toward file storage.
“Excuse me,” Gertrude said, getting up to follow him, “you know where what is?”
“The staff,” he said, hand already on the doorknob.
“You need a key for that,” Gertrude said.
“I have one.” She waited while he put the key into the lock and tried to turn it. Finally he turned and looked at her.
“You need the right key for that, I should say,” she said. “I had the locks changed. It seemed safer.”
“Look, I don’t have time for this,” he said, taking a step towards her and holding out his hand.
She stayed where she was. “Make time and explain what it is you’re doing, or get out of my archive.”
He paused, blinked. “New head archivist?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Well, I am the head archivist. For a little over four years, now. Gertrude Robinson."
"What happened to—"
She cut him off. "Who are you and why are you here?”
“Dekker,” he said. “Adelard Dekker. Sorry about—” he waved his hands vaguely at himself, the door he’d come from, and the one he was trying to get past “—but I’m in a hurry.”
“If you need something from in there, you have time to explain why,” Gertrude said.
“I really don’t.”
“That won’t work, I’m afraid. You’ll have to convince me.” Her words were laced with compulsion; if he was in such a hurry, at least this would expedite the process. And if he wasn’t quite who he implied he was, he might not even notice.
“I left something there, years ago. It’s effective against I Do Not Know You, but only if I can get it right now.” The look on Dekker’s face told her that he did know what had just happened, and he wasn’t pleased.
“All right,” she said, “I’ll go with you. We can walk and talk.” She looked at him expectantly until he moved out of the way. She’d rather not have her back to him; he didn’t seem to mean her any harm, but there was always a chance he’d notice the outline of the pistol tucked into the back of her skirt. But he didn’t mention it, and so she unlocked the door and reached for the overhead light’s pull cord, turning toward him as she went.
For his part, he bypassed all the filing cabinets and made straight for the corner with the space heater. A couple of raps to one of the wall panels, a flash of silver as he jimmied the blade of a Swiss army knife under it, and the panel was giving way. Gertrude was intrigued, despite herself. She’d found the loose floorboard next to her desk ages ago and suspected there were even more hiding places around, but hadn’t come across this one yet. Dekker reached into the space revealed by the panel and pulled out a carved staff or walking stick, about five feet tall. The carvings could have been abstract, at a distance, but if she looked closely, they resolved into—
“You wanted to walk and talk?” Dekker said. “Let’s walk and talk.” Gertrude blinked and locked up after them, pulling her raincoat on as they left the archive. It had been overcast when she'd gone in this morning, and now there was a steady drizzle, the kind that coats you no matter how long you spend outside. He was taller than her, just a bit, with longer legs, but she kept up well enough. She refused to fall behind and forfeit her chance at the answers she wanted.
One encounter with the Lure and one stop at a café later, Gertrude was fairly certain that she did not like Adelard Dekker.
“’The Grinning Wheel?’ Seriously?”
“It’s merely a working title.”
“What on earth—?”
“Based on Stacey’s notes and Fiona Law’s testimony—”
“Fiona Law?”
“And what’s that tone for?”
“Did she even stay conscious long enough to describe it?”
Well, if he didn’t like the way she worked, he didn’t have to stick around.
2. 1987
She was looking at him, the way she did. That is to say, not a normal look on anyone else, not the way someone should look at their colleague unless they were about to turn the tables and interrogate said colleague. It was a look he got from her all too often.
“I can feel you thinking at me, Gertrude.”
She didn’t even try to refute it. “In that factory, I noticed…”
“Hmm?”
“You were whispering something, or saying something under the noise of that thing screaming, I couldn’t tell.”
What? Oh. “It’s not important.”
“That seems unlikely,” she said. “Not like you to indulge in frivolity, especially on business.”
“I didn’t say it was frivolous, I said it wasn’t important.” He wondered if she could drop it, for once, but he knew that she never would. But it was fine, so long as she didn’t—
“You realize all of this evasion is only making me more curious. Tell me.”
“It’s important to me, but I doubt it would help you.” He spoke through gritted teeth now, the answer pushing to shape his mouth, form the words. The only reason he could resist at all was that she’d given him plenty of practice. She shrugged and they walked on. Times like this, half of him hated her, and the other half wondered if there really was enough of her left to hate, beyond the Eye’s influence.
It wasn’t until they were within view of the Institute again that Adelard finally spoke. “The Lord’s Prayer.” He spat the words out and immediately the thousand tiny knives at his tongue disappeared. He hated the relief he felt when he stopped fighting the compulsion, as if he needed the reminder that everything would be so much easier if he just surrendered to the Eye. He spent enough time under its roof that he felt curiously light whenever he walked out those doors—or walked away from Gertrude.
“What?” And he hated that she was asking again.
“You asked what I was saying in the factory. It was the Lord’s Prayer.”
Gertrude didn’t look at him, only said, “Oh.”
“See, this is why I didn’t want to talk about it.” He’d known the actual information wouldn’t be useful to her, that all she cared about was getting an answer to her question.
“What do you mean?”
“’Oh.’ I know what that means, and I know what you’re thinking.”
“Well then, do enlighten me. I wasn’t aware you could count clairvoyance among your skills, we could have been doing things much more efficiently—”
“This!” he said, stopping in his tracks. “You do this, and I knew you would, act like I’m stupid for believing in something I can’t prove.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Gertrude said.
“No? You pick and you push and you pry—I didn’t want to answer.”
“Then why did you?”
“You’re doing it again.”
“I’m—oh.” She actually looked embarrassed, unusual for her. “I’m sorry, I honestly didn’t mean to.”
“You know, it doesn’t even matter,” Adelard said. “It doesn’t matter if you meant to compel me or not. You just have to know everything, and you don’t care if you hurt someone, so long as you satisfy your curiosity.”
“That’s not fair,” Gertrude said.
“It’s not?” Adelard said. “Gosh, sorry, maybe I should just take off. I’d hate to think I’m being unfair to you.” He knew he sounded small, and petty, and he hated that too.
“Fine,” Gertrude said. “Not sure why you feel you need to walk me home, anyway, it’s not as though I need you for anything.”
He knew it was true in the most immediate and literal sense, and he knew she worded it purposely to be hurtful. He also knew that that last remark had depleted some vital energy reserve inside him and there was nothing he could do now but walk back to his flat and hope this situation would not play out with Gertrude again.
He knew that it would.
3. 1994
She didn't know what might happen to her if they ever touched. Agnes’s touch burned friend and foe and Gertrude wasn’t even sure which category she belonged to anymore. Then again, now that they were linked, perhaps Agnes couldn’t hurt her. Then again, perhaps a burn wouldn’t count, as fire couldn’t hurt Agnes. It wasn’t as though it mattered; that wasn’t what this was about.
When she’d started all this, when she’d thought she was just an exceptionally good researcher and investigator and was figuring all this out on her own, the auburn lock of hair in a metal box in Artifact Storage had seemed plausible. It was documented, which meant that it was supposed to be there. It had been collected by an employee of the Institute, somehow, and she was sure that a single hair would not be missed. She’d been right.
Perhaps it was just her imagination, but it was warm to the touch when she picked it up.
She wound one of her own hairs with Agnes’s, twisting and tying until she could tuck them into a cheap locket she’d bought secondhand for this purpose. It wasn’t the whole ritual, just a part of it. One of the easier parts, as it turned out. Once they were securely inside, she sewed a small scrap of linen around it and strung it on a ribbon, which she tied around her neck. Fabric could burn, of course, but then, so could most things, and it made her feel better to have an insulator between the metal of the locket and her skin.
By the time Dekker asked about it, she’d had to replace the ribbon twice, as it had been years and she had a habit of fussing with it while thinking.
“What’s that?”
“It’s nothing.” When Adelard tilted his head just slightly, Gertrude knew she’d made a mistake.
“That’s not what you say when it’s nothing,” he said. “If it was nothing, you’d say ‘it’s a necklace.’ You only ever say it’s nothing when it’s a secret.”
“Haven’t we had this conversation before?” Gertrude said. “I believe it’s the one where one of us doesn’t want to answer a question, and the other keeps needling them.”
“I don’t need you to tell me,” he said with that glint of mischief that was seldom seen on him, but still unmistakable. “I just want you to admit it’s a secret, rather than pretending you’re so smooth, you can get one over on me.”
“You’ve picked a hell of a time to grow a sense of humor,” she said, and went back to sifting through statements. Too late, she realized it looked like she was only pretending to work.
“No, you forget, I know you,” he said, and god, why hadn’t she just told him it was a necklace?
“And yet, you don’t have the first clue about this,” she said, trying to maintain a level tone. “Or when to quit. So really, how well do you know me?”
“So there’s more than one clue?” he said. She glared. “Joking, sorry. Bad joke. You’re right. I’ll leave it alone.”
“Good,” she said, not looking up at him.
A few hours later, when they’d both worked through lunch (which she said she’d buy, what with Eric out sick and Fiona and Emma taking the day off after all the overtime they’d pulled—she supposed she’d have to buy dinner now, damn it), she said, “It’s a locket.”
“What?” he said, looking genuinely confused. Of course he was. He hadn’t eaten all day and he’d just been going through who knows how many statements about potentially cursed jewelry. She was the one who said she didn’t want to talk about it, and here she was, bringing it up.
“The necklace, it’s a locket,” she said. No going back now. It felt like a relief in some ways; maybe it was penance for pulling all those answers out of him over the years. Mostly, it felt as though she was describing the plot of a book he'd almost read.
“Have you had a secret boyfriend this whole time?” The glint was back. Sometimes she appreciated it. This was not one of those times.
“No,” she said. Maybe if she implied there was a secret girlfriend, he’d drop the subject forever. “Her name is—” No, that was stupid. It wasn’t as though they didn’t share information, and it wasn’t as though he didn’t know about the cult of the Lightless Flame. This would be one of those lies that came back to bite if she told it. “It’s Agnes.”
“Your…” He was clearly waiting for her to fill in the blank. Her what? What was Agnes to her? Her apocalyptic charge, her messiah of the end times, the wild animal she’d caught and chained herself to?
“Agnes Montague.”
She watched his expression go from wary confusion to recognition to realization and horror. “Gertrude,” he said slowly, “why, exactly, do you have a picture of Agnes Montague in a locket?”
For just a moment, she wondered whether or not to correct his assumption, then thought better of it. There was enough to unpack here already. “I told you about the Desolation’s ritual, and how I needed a way to stop it. This—well, I thought I’d found a way to do just that, but it had the unexpected side effect of linking me to Agnes. This locket was… part of it.”
“And when you say you’re ‘linked—'"
“All I can say for certain is that it disrupted their ritual and they won't kill me. I know that it offers me some protection, in the form of... holding Agnes's safety hostage." Gertrude sipped from the mug of tea that had been ice cold for the last hour at least, her mouth suddenly dry. "I said it was a side effect, but it was more of a feature that I didn’t know about. The Web is tricky like that. It’s supposed to keep me safe from her disciples, but I could only guess at how much of that is Agnes’s fear and her subsequent intervention.”
“And maybe none of it is suggestion, and they’re making plans to kill you without harming Agnes!”
“If none of it was suggestion, then it’s holding just fine and you can stop worrying.”
“Hmm, not likely to stop worrying,” he said. This wasn't a blood-drawing fight, but they just might batter away at each other until one or both of them fell. For a moment, she nearly laughed at the image that occurred to her of the two of them in boxing gloves in opposite corners of a ring.
“I suppose I can’t stop you.”
“No, you—” Dekker cut himself off and scrubbed a hand over his face. “This is why you didn’t want to tell me, isn’t it? You knew how I’d react and you didn’t want to do this, so you tried to keep it to yourself.” Gertrude just looked at him and he shook his head. “It was a long time ago, and even if it wasn’t, it’s done. No use crying over spilled milk.”
“Not so much ‘spilled’ as ‘sealed up for a few decades now,’” Gertrude said.
“That’s disgusting,” Dekker said. The corner of his mouth twitched up in a reluctant smile, and Gertrude knew he wouldn’t bring it up again.
“If you're terribly put off, you’re welcome to head out,” she said, “but I was going to order Chinese.”
“Suppose I could stick around for that,” he said.
For the rest of the evening, Gertrude made sure not to fuss with the locket, but she felt it every moment, warm against her skin.
4. 2009
Setting the fire did not abate the anger that suffused her limbs and made her hands shake, but that was fine. Her hands had been steady enough as they poured accelerant around Emma Harvey’s house, steady enough as they lit the matches that would start the place blazing. It was easier with Agnes there, if only in the most literal sense; Agnes could have done the thing herself, but Gertrude had insisted. “This was my mistake,” she told her. “I’m ending it.” And so Agnes had watched Gertrude light up the house deliberately, in steps.
When Gertrude had done what she’d come to do, they backed away to a safe distance (relatively speaking; Agnes had nothing to fear from the fire and Gertrude had nothing to fear from Agnes—still, with her, no distance would be safe). Agnes looked at her, and Gertrude spared a corner of her mind to realize what she must look like: old, older than Agnes would ever look, with firelight dancing in the lenses of her glasses.
“No point in your having to be out all night,” Agnes said at last, in that unexpectedly gravelly voice. “You’ve done your part, I’ll make sure it wasn’t for nothing.” She glanced at the house and the flames leapt higher, devouring the shingles and racing up to the roof. No lights or sounds came from the house apart from the fire, and they watched until the cheery yellow walls had blackened and gone brittle, until the flames ran out of food. Without a word, they walked back to Gertrude’s tiny car, parked two streets over. Gertrude dropped Agnes off and drove home, and went to bed in clothes that smelled of smoke.
Two days later, she heard Adelard’s knock on the door to the archive. She always knew when it was him: one knock, a beat, and two quick knocks to follow. She sighed. It wasn’t like him to drop by casually, and she could guess the reason for his visit. Oh well, it wasn’t as though she could put this off forever. Maybe if she was lucky, he was bringing news about something that needed killing.
“Come in,” she called. He always opened the door more quietly than anyone else did, and she’d never been sure if it was out of courtesy, or because he’d been fighting avatars for so long that it was instinctual to find the stealthiest way to do anything.
“I heard about Emma,” Adelard said. “I’m sorry.”
She wondered just how much he'd heard. “About what?”
“About—" For a moment, he looked stricken. "Gertrude, you do know...? She died.”
“She did.”
“So that’s—”
“I killed her.”
Dekker blinked. “Sorry, you what?”
“Killed her,” Gertrude said crisply, without looking up at him.
“I heard it was a fire—”
“It was.”
“Are you—” Dekker paused, seeming to weigh his next words. “Are you going to tell me what happened, or are you just going to make me play twenty questions until I get fed up and leave you alone?”
“I won’t make you do anything,” Gertrude said, still not looking at him. “And I don’t care how you feel about it. Leave if you want, I have work to do.”
But Dekker didn’t leave, just leaned against the wall and watched as she sorted statements. She had plenty of experience with the feeling of being watched, it didn't matter that there was an extra pair of eyes boring into her. It would matter even less if she could stop her hands from shaking.
“Why?” He’d been still and silent for a long time; the single word cut through the dust and quiet of the archive.
“Why…?” She knew what he was asking. Of course she knew. But making it easy would have been counterproductive.
“Why,” he said slowly, deliberately, “did you kill Emma Harvey?”
The anger that had smoldered in her ever since she’d realized Emma’s role in Sarah’s death and Fiona’s disappearance flared, and she dropped the folder in her hands onto the desk. “Why did Emma kill Sarah Carpenter?” she said. “Why did she dispose of Fiona Law? And what else could I have done, Adelard? I am down two assistants because of Emma Harvey. Should I have called the police? And told them what, exactly?" She waited for him to answer or even just yell back, but he just stood there, motionless. "Or should I have continued to let her work here? For me? Kept trusting her with the information I gather to keep the world from ending?” Dekker wasn’t looking at her anymore, but if this was the last time she was ever going to talk about this, she would damn well make it count. “Emma Harvey was the only person at the Institute who knew about—” The name would not make it past her lips, but her hand went to the locket around her neck. “And you think I could let her live?”
He refused to answer the question. Typical. “I know about her, too, Gertrude,” he said. “Am I next on your list?”
“I don’t have a list,” Gertrude said. “This wasn’t about revenge. This was about safety. It was foolish to think I could trust someone in this line of work. We aren’t allowed that.”
His face didn’t so much contort as twitch, freezing into an expression that might have been comical under other circumstances. “I’ve trusted you, haven’t I?”
“Luckily it was a mistake you lived to regret.” With that, she sat back down, suddenly too tired even to look at him. She heard him take a step and pause for a long moment, before his footsteps resumed and retreated. The door opened but he stopped again, and she waited.
“You and Ms. Harvey have each cost you two assistants,” Dekker said over his shoulder. “Makes you even, doesn’t it.” When he left he closed the door behind him, and the steps that took him out of the basement of the Institute went unheard.
5. 2011
He shouldn’t have gone. Gertrude had told him he didn’t have to, hadn’t even suggested it, but she was so busy, and he knew Father Burroughs. They’d worked together more than once, and had more discussions than that about the forces that pushed and pulled this world. Father Edwin Burroughs had always been, to him, an emblem of stability. He wouldn’t say they were close, exactly, but then, he would say that of very few people. It was enough that there was someone else out there who shared his faith, even knowing what he knew.
And now he was in prison for murder and cannibalism.
Father Burroughs looked wrong in the prison jumpsuit. Adelard had never seen him without at least his priest’s collar in all their years of acquaintance, and the khaki washed him out. Or maybe that was the harsh fluorescents he sat under, or the overall effect of prison, or the guilt.
He had written down what he wanted to say. He didn’t do or say any anything to indicate a disbelief that Adelard was actually affiliated with the Magnus Institute; whether that was because he didn’t know or because he didn’t want to risk being left alone again was unclear. In any case, the words he spoke closely, maybe exactly, adhered to those he had written on the pages he eventually passed on to Adelard through the guard.
When he reached the end of his statement, he looked up at Adelard, his brow furrowed but his eyes wide, as though he were either pleading or searching for something. Adelard met his gaze, trying to keep his expression neutral. It was about the best he could manage under the circumstances. After a few minutes, though nothing had changed that he could see, Father Burroughs nodded twice and opened his mouth as though to speak, but he let his breath out without saying anything at all. Suddenly, Adelard was seized by the overwhelming need to hear him say something comforting. Selfish, he knew. What words could Father Burroughs possibly have to comfort him? And so they spent the rest of their time looking at each other, silent, until the guards hauled Father Burroughs to his feet and led him away.
It took Adelard a while to realize that one of the buses he’d taken back had been the wrong one. He’d sat there with his blood roaring in his ears and the statement tucked into an inner pocket in his coat, and it wasn’t until they stopped outside of Saint Paul’s that he realized he’d been insensate to the world for nearly two hours. It was well past dark when he walked into the archive, placed the statement on Gertrude’s desk, and left without saying anything.
He didn’t lose time; the phrase would imply that he was blissfully unaware of the world for a while. No, he was aware of every single moment, as though time was carving wrinkles into his skin with ragged claws, slowly, inexorably. As though the memories of Father Burroughs’s words and the images they’d conjured up were being pinned like moths to his brain. Perhaps he was careless for a moment, as he’d said in his statement. The injury done to him was not a bruise or a broken bone; it was the loss of his ability to believe his senses. The Spiral could certainly be persuasive. And perhaps it really was a demonic possession, as the priest thought. The two weren’t mutually exclusive. The thought that bothered him now was this: pride was not a mortal sin. Adelard knew he was in no position to judge these things, so he tried to push away the thought that Father Burroughs’s pride had barely been more than the assumption that he could continue to do his job, and as he’d said, fairly often, the demons plaguing a person were of the distinctly earthly variety rather than whatever had taken hold of him. To be shut out of his old life, to be cut off from his God, for that?
Three days later, he found himself sitting on the low brick wall in front of the Institute. It was dark and the late fall air cut through his coat, but he needed to feel grounding forces, and the brick and the cold and the possibility of a conversation with Gertrude Robinson were all plenty grounding, in their ways.
She didn’t look surprised to see him, but then, he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her look surprised.
“You’re here for a reason.”
“Am I?”
“Everything for a reason, isn’t it?” Right, gentle mockery was probably about the best he could expect from her. Maybe this had been a bad idea. “Adelard?”
“Hmm.”
“Why—” She broke off and started again, wiping her voice of all traces of compulsion. “Why are you here?”
“I’ve been thinking.”
“That’s unfortunate.”
“I’m not in a laughing mood, Gertrude. And I won’t be. You can’t always…” He trailed off and sighed. She sat on the wall next to him, close enough to touch, not that she would, but that was fine. After all this, he think he might actually break with reality if she tried to do something comforting like pat his arm.
“What is it?”
“I think maybe… there’s nothing else. This is it. The world. Being utterly out of control, and then death. I’ve been thinking that’s all there is.”
There was a pause. They didn’t look at each other, but Adelard could see her out of the corner of his eye. She was staring straight ahead. “What would you like me to say?”
“Forget it.” He stood and started to walk away.
“It’s not so bad,” she called after him.
“What?” He turned.
“I rather think we’ve seen the extent of what the universe has to offer. Well, broadly," she said. "But I think death may be the one thing we don’t have to worry about. We’ve done so much, and our work still isn’t over. It sounds… rather peaceful to be nothing at all, for once.”
“That’s all you’ve got?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I don’t feel better,” he said. “But thank you for trying.”
+1. 2013
“You know, I was thinking of when we first met, this morning,” Gertrude said, surveying the haul of plastic explosives in the storage unit.
Adelard stretched next to her, his spine cracking more than once with the movement. “That’s got to be, what? Over… forty years, now?” He whistled. “We got old.”
“Speak for yourself,” Gertrude said, before seeing his unimpressed look. She just about kept the smile off her face as she continued, “You’ve still got a few years on me.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, you’re a real spring chicken. Let’s get these taped back up.”
After a while, he said, “Anything in particular?”
“Hmm?”
“That you were thinking about.”
“Oh,” Gertrude said. “Just that we’ve come full circle, I suppose. The Stranger, then and now.”
“Suppose we have,” Dekker said.
“God, ‘the grinning wheel.’”
“You didn’t deserve the shit I gave you for that.” He paused. “Well, not all of it.”
“It’s true that we haven’t seen anything matching its description,” Gertrude said. “Maybe it was a… a prototype, that was deemed inefficient.”
“Never known the Entities to retire tricks,” Dekker said. “But it’s not as though they don’t adapt.” His gaze went faraway, unfocused for a moment before he shook his head.
“Have you heard back from your contacts yet?”
“Not yet. I can’t say I’m hoping for anything, that seems like rather the wrong word, but I do feel… well, I have a feeling about this.”
“Well, if it does pan out, you’d better come back in one piece, all right? I’ll need your help for the Unknowing, if it’s coming as soon as we think.”
“Do you, though?" he said, that rare mischievous humor lighting up his voice. "Does the great Gertrude Robinson really need my help?”
“Why should I do it all myself?” she countered.
“You sure you want an old man to slow you down?”
“I suppose you’ll just have to keep up.”
He rolled his shoulders—two more cracks. “Seriously, though, you do have Gerard now.”
“He is a very capable young man," she said. "Very capable, very young.”
“Still, with the things he’s seen—”
“Traumatized twenty-something aside—” Gertrude very carefully did not look at him. “Make sure you come back in one piece. I would… much rather not do this without you.”
He was quiet long enough that she thought he hadn’t heard, or hadn’t quite gotten her meaning. His reply, when it came, was quiet but clear.
“If I go, I mean to come back,” he said. “Seems like it would be irresponsible of me to disappear on you.”
Her throat felt strangely thick as she nodded. “Good. I’m glad that’s settled.”
“Yeah,” he said, before clearing his throat. “I know how much you hate the Circus.”
“The music alone,” she said, and he laughed.
In four months, Gertrude Robinson would receive an email. She would read it, print it, read it again, and ever so carefully tuck it into a box of statements. She would not cry, and she would not go looking for him, and she would not go home early. Neither would she record the statement herself; if these were the last words he had for her, she could indulge her own selfishness and imagine his own voice reading them for just a little while longer.