Seven days until they look at my body

I keep thinking about the copper smell more than I should. It was on my palm when I got up. Floor polish and something metallic and I stood there for a second too long trying to figure out if it was rust or something else and then I photographed the console and pocketed the note and left before my face showed up on a camera that was supposed to be dead. The overwrite was happening while I was standing there. Somewhere on the floor above someone is scrubbing a loop and I was in it for maybe forty-five seconds and I do not know if forty-five seconds is enough.

Bae Yu-jin will be here tomorrow and I keep rehearsing what I will say. Not the facts — she can read the note — but the part about how I found it. The service lift at 03:10. The shin that slipped again, same foot, same wet patch under the carpet like the hotel is trying to tell me something. I will not tell her that part. She will think I am reckless and she will be right.

The photographs sat on my floor under the fairy lights for almost an hour. I could not stop looking at the chair pulled out and the glass on the desk and then my own back in the frame from August 29, the back I thought was gone. I look small in that footage. I look like someone who does not know she is being watched. I have been that person a hundred times in that hotel and I did not even think to look for my own shadow.