FIND ME AGAIN

CHAPTER FOUR — HALF A BLOCK

LINNA

I made it exactly half a block.

That was further than I expected.

I had walked out of Blackwell Enterprises with my notebook under my arm and my heels clicking against the pavement with the same rhythm they had clicked all day, unhurried and deliberate, the walk I had practised until it lived in my body rather than my head. I made it through the revolving door and past the two women at reception and out into the cold New York evening and exactly half a block down the street before my legs decided they were done cooperating.

I stopped.

Not gradually. Just stopped, the way a machine stops when something essential cuts out without warning, and stood on the pavement while the city moved around me in every direction with complete indifference to the fact that I had just walked out of a room that had rearranged something fundamental inside me.

New York at six in the evening is not a place that makes room for stillness. People moved past me in both directions, shoulders angled forward, eyes ahead, everyone going somewhere with great urgency and nobody looking at anyone else. A cab leaned on its horn two lanes over. Someone to my left was on the phone, voice raised, negotiating something with the particular aggression of a person who negotiated everything that way. The smell of roasted nuts from a cart on the corner mixed with exhaust and cold air and something faintly sweet from a bakery I could not see.

I stood in the middle of all of it and tried to remember how to breathe.

In through the nose.

Out through the mouth.

My therapist in London had taught me that. Before I stopped going because the sessions were expensive and I had told myself I was fine and mostly believed it. Four counts in. Hold for four. Out for four. A small mechanical thing to do with your body when your mind was doing something you had not given it permission to do.

My mind was doing several things I had not given it permission to do.

It was doing the back steps at two in the morning. The specific quality of the silence between two people who had known each other long enough that silence was not emptiness but language. His voice saying nothing because he understood that sometimes there was nothing useful to say and staying anyway because staying was the whole point.

I pressed my notebook harder against my side.

The notebook was real. The spiral binding was pressing into my palm through my jacket and that was real and present and located in this moment rather than ten years ago and I focused on it with the concentration of a woman trying to stay on the right side of herself.

I started walking again.

Not because I had decided where I was going. Because standing still felt worse than moving and I had always been better in motion, had always done my clearest thinking when my body had something to do. My heels found their rhythm again against the pavement but it was different now, slightly uneven, slightly faster than I intended, and I noticed that and could not entirely correct it.

The city kept going around me.

A woman in a yellow coat walked past talking to herself or to an earpiece, laughing at something, entirely inside her own world. Two men in suits stood outside a bar with their jackets open despite the cold, the kind of men who had decided they were too important to be affected by weather. A child on a scooter shot past me on the inside of the pavement and I stepped aside automatically and the movement put me briefly in front of a darkened shop window and I caught my own reflection.

I looked like myself.

That was the thing that stopped me for half a second. I looked exactly like Lin Carter, Senior Operations Manager, first day complete, walking home through the city with her notebook and her silk blouse and her heels and her expression that did not give anything away. I looked like a woman who was fine.

My hands were shaking.

Not violently. Barely visibly. The kind of shaking that lives just under the surface, in the muscles rather than the bones, the kind that only shows up when you have been holding something very tightly for a very long time and your body is registering the cost of it before your mind is ready to.

I had been holding it since five o clock.

Since the door opened and I walked in looking at the floor and then looked up.

Since the world stopped.

I turned off the main street onto a quieter one, needing less noise, needing the volume of the city turned down slightly so I could hear myself think. The neon from a laundromat threw pink light across the wet pavement. A restaurant I had never heard of had its windows fogged with warmth and through the glass I could see people at tables, leaning toward each other, laughing, entirely safe inside their ordinary evenings.

I kept walking.

He had said my name.

Not Lin. Linna. The name I had not heard from his mouth in ten years, said in a voice that had dropped and steadied and learned how to be cold since the last time I heard it, and still, underneath all of that, still carrying something I recognised. Something that my body had recognised before my mind caught up, in the lobby this morning when I smelled cedar and stopped half a second for no reason I could explain to myself.

My body had known before I did.

I pressed my palm flat against the notebook.

The plan was still intact. That was what I needed to focus on. He had kept me on. He had looked at me across that desk with everything that was in his eyes and everything that was in mine and he had said *you are still hired* in the voice of a man making a business decision rather than any other kind and I had said *I need the job* and he had said *I know* and that was all it was.

A business arrangement.

Two adults who had a history that was ten years old and buried and were going to behave like the professionals they had both spent the last decade becoming.

I believed that.

I almost believed that.

I raised my hand for a cab and one pulled over with the immediate efficiency that only happened in New York when you desperately needed a moment before getting in. I got in. Gave my address. Sat back.

The city slid past the window in streaks of gold and red and the particular blue of a New York evening that I had forgotten about in London, that specific shade that exists for about twenty minutes before it becomes full dark and that I had not seen in ten years and that made my chest do something I was not prepared for.

I had missed this city.

I had not let myself know that until right now.

I pressed my forehead against the cold glass of the window and closed my eyes and held the notebook in both hands in my lap like it was the only solid thing available and focused on the cold against my forehead, the real physical fact of it, something that existed only in this moment and nowhere else.

My pulse was doing something it was not supposed to be doing.

Not fear exactly. Not quite. Something older than fear and more complicated, something that lived in the part of you that remembers things your conscious mind has filed away, that gets activated by a voice saying your name in a room you did not expect to be in and spends the rest of the evening making itself known in your hands and your breathing and the way the city looks out of a cab window at six fifteen on a Monday.

I was not fine.

I knew that.

I would be fine tomorrow. I would wake up and press my clothes and take the subway and walk through that revolving door and do the job I had been hired to do with exactly the focus and precision the role required. I would be Lin Carter tomorrow without any of the difficulty it had cost me today.

But right now, with my forehead against the cold glass and my hands gripping the notebook and the city moving past in streaks of colour, I let myself know that I was not fine.

Just for the length of this cab ride.

Just until I got home.

Then I would put it away again.

I was good at putting things away.