I Let Myself Forget So They Could Show Me Who They Were

Chapter 3: Marguerite's Notebook

The studio was on the third floor of an old rope factory down on Cannery Street, six thousand square feet of brick and glass and good northern light that I had signed a fifteen-year lease on the day I turned twenty-seven. I climbed the stairs at twelve-forty in the morning and stood on the landing with my key in my hand and my heart in my throat.

The key still worked. That was the first thing that went right.

Inside, nothing had changed and everything had changed. The sample boards were still up. The drafting table was still cluttered. But the file cabinet that had always held the client contracts was standing open, empty, and the small safe behind the framed poster was gone.

I stood in the dark and looked at the empty square where the safe had been, and I felt the floor drop out of me for a second. The ring. The files. Everything I had hidden.

Then I heard a chair scrape, and a voice from the back office said, "Put your hands where I can see them and tell me who you are before I call the police."

Marguerite.

I put my hands up. "It's me," I said. "It's Iris."

A pause. Then the office door opened and Marguerite came out, all five feet two of her, wearing the same leather jacket she had worn to my engagement party, holding a fire extinguisher like a club.

"You're supposed to be in a coma," she said.

"I'm supposed to be a lot of things," I said. "Can I put my hands down?"

She set the extinguisher on the floor but did not come closer. The light from the street made her face half bright, half shadow, and she looked at me the way you look at a ghost you are not sure you want to believe in.

"Caroline told me you had amnesia," she said. "She told me you wouldn't remember me. She told me Daniel was handling the accounts and the lease and that I should talk to him if I needed anything."

"She lied," I said. "Obviously."

"Obviously," Marguerite said, in a voice that was still tight. "Because three weeks ago Daniel came here and took the safe out of the wall, and when I asked him why, he said it was because you were sick and he was making things simpler. And then two weeks ago a lawyer came by with a piece of paper that says you're transferring your ownership of the studio name to a holding company. And it had your signature on it. And I looked at that signature, Iris, and I knew it was not yours, because you dot your i's like a child. Everyone who has ever worked with you knows that. And this signature had the dots directly over the stems like a robot."

I let out a breath. "Marguerite."

"Where have you been?" she said, and her voice cracked then, and she came across the room and hugged me hard, the fire extinguisher forgotten, and I held onto her because she was the first real thing I had touched in nine days.

We sat in the back office with the lights off and the streetlight coming in through the window, and I told her everything. The texts I had found. The receipt from the jeweler. The plan I had made after the accident. The camera I had clipped to the hospital tray. The two-week countdown Caroline had said in my own kitchen.

Marguerite listened with her hands wrapped around a cold mug and did not interrupt once. When I finished, she got up and unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk and took out a spiral notebook, the kind we used for client sketches, and put it down in front of me.

"I keep notes," she said. "You know I keep notes. Every meeting, every change to a contract, every time someone asks me to sign something without you. The day after your accident, Daniel called me and told me the studio was going to be restructured, that you were too sick to run it, and that I could either sign the new agreement or be bought out for what he called a fair price."

"What was the fair price?" I asked.

"Forty thousand," she said. "For a business worth at least six hundred, with the building and the name and the client list."

I looked at the notebook. She had written it all down. Dates, times, names. She had photocopied the forged signature and taped it to the page. She had written down the lawyer's name, a man named Percival Greaves downtown, and the number of the holding company, and the date on which Daniel had told her the new lease would be signed.

"He wanted me gone before you woke up," she said. "If you woke up."

I thought about the letters in the drawer at home, both from a downtown law firm. "Greaves," I said.

"You know him?"

"No," I said. "But I know the firm's address, and I know there are two letters from them sitting in Daniel's kitchen drawer, and I intend to read them before he burns them."

Marguerite leaned back. "Okay," she said. "So what's the plan?"

I looked at her notebook, at the photocopied forgery, at the dates and names, and I felt the cold thing that had been sitting in my chest since the hospital start to turn, slowly, into something with an edge.

"First," I said, "I need to know who the man named Greaves is working for, because the holding company takes orders from someone, and I don't think it's Daniel."

"Why not?"

"Because Daniel is a project manager," I said. "He has never in his life been a principal in anything. And the two of them talked in my kitchen about what happens in two weeks like they were waiting for something to land, not like they were building something."

Marguerite wrote the name Greaves on a fresh page and underlined it twice. Then she looked up at me with an expression I had seen on her face a thousand times, the one that meant she was about to do something she had been wanting to do for a while.

"There's someone you should talk to," she said. "He came by the studio four days after your accident. He stood on the landing for twenty minutes because I wouldn't let him in, and he left a card. He said if you ever came back, you should call him before you called anyone else."

"Who?"

"His name is Adrian Frost," she said. "He says he's your brother."

I sat very still.

I do not have a brother. My mother had one child and raised her alone, and I had spent my whole childhood knowing that the two of us were the whole family, and that whatever came before us was a closed door.

But I also knew, because my mother had told me once on a night when she was tired and honest, that there had been a man before my father, and that he had a son, and that the son had a name she had never said out loud.

She had never said the name. But she had said the son existed. And now here he was, standing on my studio landing, asking for me before anyone else, while the two people I had loved most in the world stood in my kitchen and counted down the days until I was gone.

I took the card. It had a phone number and an address in the hills north of the city, and a single line printed under his name: Family law. Frost and Pallister.

A lawyer. Daniel's people had a lawyer. It seemed I had one too, whether I wanted him or not.

"How do you know he's my brother?" I said.

"I don't," Marguerite said. "But he knew your mother's name, and he knew the year you were born, and he knew the name of the town where you grew up, and Iris, he looked at me the way you look at me. Like he was trying not to hope too much."

I put the card in my pocket, next to the studio key. Outside the window the fog was rolling in off the water, swallowing the streetlights one by one. I had left Daniel's apartment in the middle of the night and now I could not go back without an explanation, so I would have to let them think I had wandered, that I had gotten lost, that the poor confused woman had wandered out in the night, which was, I realized, exactly the story that would help me most.

"One more thing," I said. "I need you to tell them I was here. If Daniel calls, if Caroline calls, tell them I came in and I was confused and you sent me home. Don't tell them one word about the notebook, or the safe, or the lawyer."

Marguerite nodded slowly. "You're going to keep playing."

"For a little while," I said. "They're counting down to something. I need to find out what it is before they finish."

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she did something she had done for six years, which was to believe me, and she put the kettle on, and I sat in the dark of my own studio and read her notebook from cover to cover, and by the time the sky turned gray over the water I knew three things I had not known at midnight.

I knew the name of the lawyer who had forged my signature.

I knew the name of the holding company that was waiting to take my studio.

And I knew that it belonged to a family whose name I had heard exactly once before, in a hospital room in the spring, from the mouth of the man I was engaged to marry.

The Frosts.