Receipts and the light I couldn't turn off

I sent Vijay two photos tonight and I hate that it mattered. Soft grey sweater, then the silk one with the collarbone crop — the one where my expression is supposed to look effortless but took eleven tries. Eleven tries for a photo I was sending to someone who has never seen me move through a lobby. I do not understand why I needed this to be right. I needed it to be right, and I am not going to examine that sentence too closely.

The specimen bag is beside my identification. Dried blood on cotton, a dark hair that is not mine, and Im's handwriting: I keep your receipts too. He came to Eun-bi's apartment with a bandaged hand and offered her brother a visa in exchange for silence. I keep your receipts too. As if what he did to me was a mutual mistake we are both keeping accounts of. As if the ledger balances. My hands shook when I photographed the bag this evening but my voice when I spoke to Eun-bi was steady. I do not know when I learned to sound calm while my knuckles go white around the phone. I think it was the lobby. You cannot be the person who looks shaken in a five-star corridor.