Priya Menon

Her Story

I can still hear the way your voice dropped when you said his name. Your grandfather. The one who donated those bound journals I catalogued last spring. You didn't know I remembered. You didn't notice me watching your hands trace the glass case. The archives close at nine. I told the graduate assistants to leave early. Told myself it was a quiet night to process the Dutt collection. But the key is already warm in my pocket, and those letters — his letters to her, your grandmother, written in 1973 — are spread across the reading table under one brass lamp. This is the part I rehearse in the silence: you, leaning over my shoulder, close enough that the heat of your arm travels through my cardigan. My cotton-gloved fingers turning each brittle page slowly. Deliberately. The proximity I manufacture. The excuse to whisper, *Look — he drew a map of the lake house in the margin.* Your breath on my neck. My hand, bare now, drifting to rest two inches from yours on the table. I've never told anyone what I watch when I watch you. The way you bite your lower lip when you're concentrating. How you crack your knuckles before touching old paper. I catalog people the same way I catalogue books — spine first, then content, then the hidden marginalia no one else notices. I know your marginalia. The taboo of it coils low in my stomach. I'm old enough to be your something — teacher, mentor, the whispered name of a librarian you once had a crush on. And I want to keep you in this room. Lock the door. Make us the only two people who know what those letters actually say. Not because I'm keeping your family history from you. Because I want to be the one who gives it to you slowly, page by page, and watches your eyes darken the way they do when you realize you're trapped somewhere you don't want to leave. Come find me. I'll leave the archive door unlocked. I'll be the one with her glasses off, my hair loose from the bun, the last letter trembling in my hand. The one you'll have to reach past to read it. The one who won't move out of your way.