After eleven years in this practice, Brin knew what most archives looked like. They looked like the expected things: parents, oldest friends, the people who had bathed you when you were small, the first person you had slept with, a few sustained presences that accumulated over decades. Sometimes a single touch so significant it held the density of a decade. The work was usually recognizable.
Today's appointment had been recognizable until the last ten minutes.
She had been completing the standard mid-body survey when she noticed something she had not encountered before in exactly this form: the last trace was recent and very clean. Not faded. Not the usual slight blurring at the edges that a recent touch carried while it was still settling. It was clean the way a finished thing is clean, the way a sentence is clean when someone has revised it to its final form.
She had thought of this, and then she had not said it, because there was no good way to say it and it was not, strictly, within her professional scope.
What she had said instead: approximately seven weeks ago. The hands. The upper arms. The patient had recognized this. The patient had held something in her face that Brin had seen many times and still found difficult to witness: the recognition of what the body had kept without asking permission.
After the patient left, Brin sat at her desk for a while.
She had her own archive. She had been in this work long enough to know what was in it and was not curious. She knew which presences would be there, in which intensities, at what locations. She knew which traces would be thin and which would be dense and which would be, in the language she used for her reports, intentional and aware of themselves.
There was one trace she could not predict. Someone she had known for six months, years ago, who had touched her hands repeatedly during a period of mutual work. She did not know if these touches had registered as significant, or as the ordinary functional contact of people who worked together closely. She had no way to know without looking.
She had never looked.
She closed her desk files. She put on her coat. The laundry below was still running, the machines doing their regular patient work.
She locked up and took the stairs down, past the sound of water.