Resa had been certifying documents for nineteen years, and she had learned to distinguish three kinds of wrongness in a record: the wrongness of intent, the wrongness of error, and the wrongness that had no author. The first two were her work. The third was what she had been sitting with for five weeks.
The land deed on her desk was the first kind. A date shifted three years, a motivated seller, a probable inheritance dispute. She annotated the shift, certified the deed as compromised, put it in the outbox. Standard Tuesday.
Her own file was at the corner of the desk. She had taken it from the cabinet five weeks ago and had not been able to put it back. It sat in the corner in the way that something sits when it is waiting for you to be ready for it.
The file concerned a nine-year period beginning in her twenty-third year. She had documentation from it: an approved leave form, a re-entry record, a professional development credit. All the paper was correct. All of it had been produced in the correct sequence by the correct offices with the correct dates. She had examined the paper twice. It was genuine.
She had no memory of the nine years.
She remembered twenty-two. She remembered thirty-two. Between those ages her memory was continuous in the way memories are continuous, not a film but a set of rooms you have been in, with the smell and the specific light of each. Except there were rooms missing. The leave form said she had taken nine years for personal reasons. Personal reasons was a classification. She had signed the form. She knew her own signature.
The wrongness she felt in her own file was the third kind. Not the wrongness of someone who had altered something. The wrongness of something that had been altered before there was a person to remember it being otherwise.
She put the deed in the outbox. She picked up her own file. She opened the cover. She looked at the first page for a long time. She closed it. She put it back at the corner of the desk.
She picked up the next case.