Chapter 10: A Century of Forgetting, Practiced

The bank was on Threadneedle Street, which Vera had always found appropriate. Thread. Needle. The work of repair and the instrument of puncture, compressed into a single address.

She arrived at half past nine on a Tuesday, which was when she always arrived at places she had not visited in a long time — mid-morning, mid-week, when the staff were neither fresh enough to be curious nor tired enough to make errors. She had learned this in a century when the staff were called clerks and wore different collars and the building had a different name, though the vault beneath it was the same. Vaults do not change their names. They simply deepen.

The woman at the desk asked for identification, and Vera produced it — Dr. Eleanor Voss, the current configuration, the one she had inhabited for eleven years and would vacate in nine months, though she had not yet told herself this in so many words. She was aware of the approaching limit the way one is aware of weather: as a change in atmospheric pressure, not yet visible but already felt in the joints.