The Lines She Drew

### Nessa

Iria wrote the first version on the back of an old inventory sheet. She covered half a page, read it over, then turned it facedown beneath her hand.

“I can’t tell if this sounds like I’m asking him to find the room,” she said.

We were still at the table where my mother’s papers lay in their clear envelope. The Heddle Court key rested beside it. Iria had left it there, and neither of us had touched it since.

“Are you asking him to find it?”

“No.” She rubbed her thumb along the edge of the inventory sheet. “I don’t know if it’s there. I don’t want him to go looking because I told him about it.”

I moved my tea away from the papers. “Then say that.”

She gave me a look over the page. “You make it sound easy.”

“I’m not the one writing to him.”

That seemed to settle it. Iria turned the sheet over and began again on clean paper. She wrote slowly, pausing to choose a word, then crossed out whole lines without comment. I sorted the cabinet records into dated piles and kept my attention there. She deserved to make this letter without an audience, even if she had asked me to stay in the room.

When she finished, she read it once in silence and folded it.

“I told him about the cup,” she said. “And the maps.”

“Did you ask him to find anything?”

“No.” She set the folded page near the mailbox. “I told him I don’t want him to.”

I carried the envelope with my mother’s records to the shelf. The address on the key label remained visible through the plastic. I could have offered to search city records for Heddle Court, to find out whether the building still stood or what had replaced it. The suggestion came easily. I let it go.

Iria slid her letter through the mailbox slot. The flap shut with its old, ordinary clack.

### Milo

Iria’s letter arrived while I was finishing a map correction for the west ward. The city had moved a property line on paper but not on the ground, and my supervisor wanted both versions to agree before the new copies went out. I had spent the morning making the same street narrower by a pencil’s width.

Her letter began with the room.

*I copied maps for the city. The work was dull when the lines were already right. I liked finding the places where they were wrong. A house built past its boundary. A lane that had been renamed but not on every copy. I could fix those things with a ruler and a clean sheet.*