The doctor said the face was not identifiable.
Then he read the rest of it off a sheet.
Male, approximately thirty-two. Six feet one. Blood type A positive. An old surgical scar low on the right abdomen consistent with an appendectomy.
Cassian is thirty-two. He is six feet one. He is A positive.
He had his appendix out in 2020.
He lifted his shirt in that room and the scar was exactly where the doctor had said.
In the lift on the way back up to our floor at about half five he took my face in both hands.
“Anouk. Look at me. It’s me.”
And he told me about the chapel wall at college, and the garlic bread, and how I had nearly died of embarrassment afterward about my breath.
Nobody else in the world knows that.
I wanted to be relieved and I nearly got there.
Then he pressed the button for our floor with his left hand, and Cassian does everything with his right, and I stood in that lift and felt the floor move.
At nine the police rang again.
The truck had left our parking garage at twenty-two minutes past ten the previous night. The driver wore a cap. The camera angle is useless.
And the smart lock on our apartment had no record of Cassian leaving. None. According to that system he was inside from six in the evening.
When I put the phone down I remembered two more things.
He had made me a hot milk before bed and stood there while I took my tablet for the insomnia, which he has never once done.
And when I woke up at 3:17 he was in grey pyjamas, and I would have sworn in a courtroom that he went to bed in the black ones.
He left for work at half eight.
I opened the lock app.
There are three fingerprints on that door.
Mine. Cassian’s. And a third one with no name on it, added eight months ago.
It has come through my front door forty-seven times.
Almost always between one and three in the morning.
And on at least eleven of those nights, my husband was already in the apartment with me.
PART 2 — THE SEVENTIETH
Cassian and I met in 2018 and married in 2020.
He is a structural technician for a firm that does bridges and he is the single most predictable human being I have ever loved. Same coffee. Same route. Same three shirts.
