His Notes

Ash put the page face down when Delilah arrived, then wished he had left it alone. He had asked her to read his words. Leaving her to turn it over would not make that a kinder invitation.

“Is that it?” she asked.

“The passage about you. There are no customer details in this copy. It isn’t the whole working file.”

She took off her coat and sat opposite him. They had chosen a quiet table in a café she used near home. He had suggested Tuesday because he didn’t want to bring the note to the cinema tomorrow. She had said she wanted to read it before then too.

He had been grateful for the agreement. He could see now how badly he had wanted it to mean they agreed about everything that would follow.

Delilah turned the page over.

The heading was Working hypothesis: possible internal source. Beneath it he had printed the date of his first note, then the original paragraph, then Friday’s correction. He had marked the copy as an extract. He could not offer her the sight of a piece of paper as proof that no other copy had ever left his hands.

She read silently. Ash watched her reach the main paragraph and stop.

“Apparent concern,” she said.

He knew which two words. He had read them often enough that morning to lose the brief, dishonest comfort of thinking they were technical.

Delilah laid the page between them and read aloud.

“‘Crane’s alterations to approved language, repeated requests concerning withheld correspondence and apparent concern about further contact are consistent with a possible role as an internal source.’”

The café was quiet enough that he could hear milk being heated at the counter. He wished it would stop. Then it stopped and there was nothing to listen to except his own sentence.

“You told me you had put the facts together as if that made them stronger,” she said. “You didn’t say you’d put quotation marks around caring.”

“I didn’t use quotation marks.”

She looked at him.

Ash closed his mouth. He had answered the one part of the sentence he could correct.

“That’s what the word does,” he said. “You’re right.”

“I know I’m right about a word.” She drew the page back. “I was standing in your doorway asking when a woman would get the letter she’d been promised. This is what you wrote about it.”

“Yes.”

He wanted to tell her when he had changed his mind, how much of the doubt had already existed when he wrote the note, why he had never sent it. All true things. She already knew them. None would take apparent off the page in front of her.

“The request is a fact,” Delilah said. “My concern apparently wasn’t.”

“I treated it as something I needed to explain by finding another motive.”

“You could have asked why the letters weren’t going out.”

“I did ask.”

“And still you wrote this.”

He nodded. It was worse than having failed to notice. He had noticed the unanswered request and put the weight on the person repeating it.

She finished the paragraph. There was one more line: No direct evidence of unauthorised disclosure identified; further corroboration required. When he had first written it, that qualification had seemed sufficient. It had allowed him to retain a suspicion he could not defend and call the retention caution.

“I see the correction,” she said.

He did not reach to point it out. Under Friday’s date he had written that the observations described ordinary work, that no source had been identified and that the hypothesis was unsupported. He had recorded withdrawing it. The words were clear. So were the words above them.

“Do you want to ask me anything about it?” he said.

“Why did you show me today?”

The answer he had prepared concerned her right to know, accuracy, the possibility that she would encounter the record later. He could give those reasons. She would hear the gap before he had finished speaking.

“I wanted you to have the wording before we went out again. I also wanted to be able to stop wondering when you’d ask for it.”

“You wanted this done.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not done with it.”

“I can hear that.”

Delilah put both hands around the glass of water the waiter had brought. Ash ordered tea when the waiter came back. She asked for coffee. He had begun to think of knowing how she took tea as knowing something substantial about her. She could choose coffee; she could read his note and decide she wanted neither drink nor company. The intimacy of yesterday had made none of her choices his.

“When I asked you to stay for that call,” she said, “did you write that down?”

“Not as evidence against you. The record of the call says I was present. This passage doesn’t include our conversation afterwards.”

“I can see what this passage includes.”

“Yes. I’m telling you what I remember of the rest. I won’t pretend this copy verifies it.”

She looked up. The distinction cost him the appearance of providing a complete answer. He let it cost him.

“I don’t want your whole file,” she said. “I don’t want other people’s information because you’re embarrassed about mine.”

“You won’t get it.”

“Good.” She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “I want you to understand that I can believe the script mattered to you and still hate this.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? Because you’re sitting there as if I’m about to decide which of those things is real.”

Ash looked down at his hands. He had locked them together beneath the edge of the table. He loosened them.

“I keep hoping you’ll tell me who I am after this.”

Delilah’s expression changed. It was not forgiveness. He knew her well enough now to recognise a question she had decided to ask instead of a verdict.

“Would you believe me?”

“For a while.”

“That sounds exhausting. For both of us.”

“It is.”

The drinks arrived. She moved the page away from the cup, protecting it from a ring. He wanted to thank her for doing that and knew she had not done it for his comfort.

“You wrote something harmful,” she said. “Then you stopped treating it as a useful possibility. I need you to be the person who did both. I can’t keep sorting you into one or the other before I let you near me.”

His throat tightened. She was not making him smaller than the mistake. She was also declining to make him larger than it because he’d kissed her well.

“I won’t ask you to,” he said.

She drank her coffee. He let the silence last without adding another promise to it.

After a while she touched the edge of the paper. “May I keep this copy?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not promising to keep my own name secret for you.”

“I know.”

She folded the extract once and put it in her bag. He still had his working record. There was no ceremonial tearing-up, no easy way to make the page cease to have existed.

“I’m going to walk home,” she said. “On my own.”

“All right.”

“I’m also going to the cinema tomorrow. With you, if you still want to.”

“I do.” The answer came out too quickly to have been prepared. “Very much.”

Delilah looked at him for a moment. “Then don’t turn up as a man serving a sentence. I don’t want to spend the evening making you comfortable enough to enjoy it.”

“I won’t ask you to do that.”

“You might not notice you’re asking.”

He heard the warning, and the care in bothering to give it.

“I’ll try to notice.”

She stood. He stood too, leaving her room to put on her coat. Neither reached for the other. Ash watched her go, then sat down and drank the tea while it was still warm. His instinct was to send a message improving on every inadequate thing he’d said. He kept his phone in his pocket. Delilah knew where he was. She had just told him where she intended to be tomorrow.

· · ·Scene break

On Wednesday, Ash arrived at the cinema with no idea what was showing and a packet of mints he had bought because he hoped to kiss Delilah afterwards.

He considered eating one before she arrived. He considered how much planning that involved for a man who had been asked to improvise. Then he ate one because he wanted it.

Delilah appeared at the end of the queue, unbuttoning her coat. He stepped toward her and stopped at the smile she gave him, not from uncertainty but because he wanted to have seen it before doing anything else.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello.”

She put a hand on his shoulder and kissed him. Briefly, on the mouth, in the middle of people deciding whether they wanted popcorn. He felt his smile against hers and did not apologise for it.

“Mints,” she said.

“There are more.”

“Thoughtful.”

“Not entirely.”

Her laugh loosened something in his chest. She took his hand and pulled him toward the board. The next film began in twelve minutes. The poster showed a woman standing beside a car with its bonnet up.

“No boat,” Delilah said. “We have a chance.”

They bought two tickets. Ash did not read the description while she paid for popcorn. She came back with a tub large enough to make him ask how long the film was.

“I don’t know. We may have to stay for another.”

Inside, she chose seats a few rows from the back and put the tub between them. For the first ten minutes they both watched with exaggerated concentration. Then the woman in the film abandoned the broken car, and Delilah leaned toward his ear.

“Sensible.”

He turned to answer and found her very close. She smelled faintly of the soap he’d noticed when she’d kissed him outside. Her eyes flicked to his mouth, then back to the screen.

“Watch,” she whispered.

“I’m trying.”

She took his hand beneath the armrest, where neither could reach the popcorn properly, and kept it. Ash spent a happy and unreasonable amount of the next scene working out how to eat with his left hand. He had no wish to move the right one.

By the time the woman reclaimed her car, Delilah had rested her head against his shoulder. He shifted enough to make a place for her. She settled closer. He could feel her laughter when the film was funny and the stillness when it wasn’t. The pleasure of having her there lasted beyond his first urge to make it mean something.

Afterwards they disagreed about the ending. She thought the woman should have left the city. He thought she had finally found a reason to stay.

“You would,” Delilah said, and stole the last mint.

On the pavement she tucked herself against his side while they waited for the crossing. He put his arm around her. She slid her hand beneath the edge of his coat, warm against his back through his shirt, and he lost the sentence he had been about to say.

“Tell me later,” she said.

He bent and kissed her, with her hand holding him close and the cold evening air on the other side of his face. They missed the first green light. When it changed again, she drew him forward, laughing, and he came willingly.

He had not earned a different past by keeping one Wednesday. He had kept Wednesday. Walking beside her, listening to her make a better argument about the film, he began to understand how much of a life could be made that way.