The watch I bought him for our fifth anniversary. The wallet with the corner worn through. The ring, with our initials inside it, which I had engraved myself at a counter in 2019.
“They can take everything I own,” Cassian said. “That doesn’t make the d.e.a.d man me.”
The doctor said the face was not identifiable.
Then he read the rest of it off a sheet.
Male, approximately thirty-two. Six feet one. Blood type A positive. An old surgical scar low on the right abdomen consistent with an appendectomy.
Cassian is thirty-two. He is six feet one. He is A positive.
He had his appendix out in 2020.
He lifted his shirt in that room and the scar was exactly where the doctor had said.
In the lift on the way back up to our floor at about half five he took my face in both hands.
“Anouk. Look at me. It’s me.”
And he told me about the chapel wall at college, and the garlic bread, and how I had nearly died of embarrassment afterward about my breath.
Nobody else in the world knows that.
I wanted to be relieved and I nearly got there.
Then he pressed the button for our floor with his left hand, and Cassian does everything with his right, and I stood in that lift and felt the floor move.
At nine the police rang again.
The truck had left our parking garage at twenty-two minutes past ten the previous night. The driver wore a cap. The camera angle is useless.
And the smart lock on our apartment had no record of Cassian leaving. None. According to that system he was inside from six in the evening.
When I put the phone down I remembered two more things.
He had made me a hot milk before bed and stood there while I took my tablet for the insomnia, which he has never once done.
And when I woke up at 3:17 he was in grey pyjamas, and I would have sworn in a courtroom that he went to bed in the black ones.
He left for work at half eight.
