Sunday the 7th.
Dr. Halvorsen,
You told me to write the way I talk. I'll do better: I'll write the way I think, and you'll see it isn't the same thing. When I talk, I choose. When I think, it chooses for me.
You want me to start with the incident. I'll start with Léa, because everything starts with Léa.
My sister is two years younger than me and three centimeters taller. She has the kind of beauty that makes people speak to her slowly, as if she might fly away. She never flew away. She stayed. I'm the one who left, twice, and came back, twice, and the second time she opened the flat door with a key she'd had cut in my name.
"See," she said. "I knew."
She always knows. That's her talent. Mine is telling.
The flat has three bedrooms. Hers, mine, and the one we call the guest room, although we never have guests. The door is closed. Not locked — just closed, like a sentence you don't finish.
You're going to ask what's inside. Everyone asks, eventually. I'll tell you what I always say: boxes. Our mother's things. We haven't had the courage.
That's true. It isn't the truth, but it's true.
The incident, then.
Thursday, 11:40 p.m. Léa was asleep. I know because I checked: her door ajar, her breathing slow, one hand outside the duvet the way she slept at seven. I crossed the hallway. I put my hand on the guest room handle.
And I heard Léa say, behind me, very calmly: "Nora. No."
She hadn't moved. I'm certain. I was between her and the door, and she was asleep, and her voice still came from behind me.
There. That's the incident. Not the broken vase, not the neighbors, not what Léa told the paramedics. That.
I know what you're going to write in your notebook. I know because I'd write it too, in your place. But I'm asking you one thing, one only, before you do:
Ask Léa what's in the guest room. And watch her hands when she answers.
Until next Sunday.
Nora