I Was Paid to Remember Her

How it begins

The woman on the tape remembered my yellow shoes.

I stopped the recording.

Outside my office, a delivery driver argued with the broken lift. Somewhere above me, a chair scraped across a floor. These ordinary sounds seemed suddenly useful. I listened to them until my hands steadied.

Then I pressed play again.

"The left one had a buckle missing," the woman said. "She carried it because she thought the river would want something in exchange."

I had never told anyone about the shoe.

Not my husband. Not the counselor. Not the police officer who had asked the wrong question beside the bridge thirty-eight years earlier.

The woman on the tape had died last Tuesday.

According to the executor, we had never met.

I opened the folder beside my keyboard. One photograph. A death certificate. A commission to reconstruct seven days in the life of Eleanor Saye, retired school secretary, no surviving children.

The fee was generous without being absurd. That had reassured me.

I now wished it had been absurd.

My phone rang.

The executor's name appeared on the screen.

"Have you begun?" Ruth Venn asked.

"Who made these recordings?"

"A private researcher."

"Name?"

A pause.

"That information wasn't included in the inventory."

I looked at the photograph. Eleanor stood beside a greenhouse, one hand raised against the sun. The image was recent. Her face meant nothing to me.

Behind her, nearly hidden by a tomato plant, was a blue enamel sign.

I enlarged it.

Four white letters emerged from the blur.

They were the first four letters of the town we had left the morning after the bridge.

"Nina?" Ruth said.

I turned the photograph facedown.

On the desk, my interview consent forms waited for signatures from people whose stories I had always believed belonged to them.

"Before I agree to anything else," I said, "I need you to tell me who chose me for this job."