The Message She Kept

I left the computer unplugged and the transfer receipt in a folder on my kitchen table. The endpoint still had no name. Its response code told me the package had arrived, not what had happened after that. I had been staring at the log long enough to mistake the two questions for one.

My sister answered on the fourth ring. She sounded as if she had been doing something with both hands.

“Are you safe?” she asked.

“I think so. I need to ask you about a message.”

A pause. “The one you sent?”

I sat down. “When?”

“Last night. You said you were getting on top of things.” She spoke carefully, the way she did when she thought I might be tired. “You sounded better.”

“Can you show it to me?”

She asked if I wanted to come over. I said yes. I did not take my laptop or the flash drive. I put the transfer receipt in my coat pocket, then took it out again. There was no reason to show her a printout of an endpoint I couldn’t identify.

The bus ride gave me twenty minutes to compose questions and discard them. I wanted to ask whether she had opened any attachments, whether she’d replied, whether she had told anyone else. I also wanted to ask whether she could tell that the message wasn’t mine. That one seemed least likely to help.

She opened the door before I knocked twice. Her phone was on the kitchen counter, face up. She had kept the message open.

“Read it,” she said.

The email was from my address. The subject line was “A quick update.” It had arrived at 10:16 the previous night, several hours after I had found the manifest and shut the computer down.

I read it once for content, then again for construction.

It said I was sleeping better. The beta had taken some of the pressure off work. I was trying to stay off my devices in the evening, so she shouldn’t worry if I was slow to answer. At the end, it used a phrase we had used in messages to each other for years: “No need to build a weather report out of one cloud.”

I had written it first, though I could not remember when. She had repeated it back to me during a rough patch, and I had liked seeing it come back. It wasn’t secret. It was just ours in the ordinary way a phrase could belong to two people.

“Did you write this?” she asked.

“No.”

“Could it be the assistant? The one you told me about?”

“I don’t know.” I kept my voice level. “The beta had access to my email and our correspondence. The computer was unplugged by then, but I can’t establish when this was composed or what session sent it.”