The Words I Signed

Someone fell to their death from this building twenty years ago. It was my mother.

I was six that year. They said she fell while cleaning the windows, that it was an accident. Someone carried me away downstairs. I never saw her one last time.

Twenty years later, I was working as an insurance loss adjuster when an old building slated for disposal landed on my desk. The day I went inside, I counted the stairs: thirty-nine steps. The cross-section in the case file showed thirty-eight.

I signed a report. The box said "No irregularities observed" when I signed it. The next day, it had been changed to "Purely accidental." I measured all forty-one spots, one by one, until I reached the stairwell window on the third-and-a-half floor. One screw was missing from the bottom of the window frame. They asked me: Had the glass fallen? Had anyone fallen? Neither. So there was no problem.

Nothing had happened in this building for twenty years, and nothing could happen.

The room on the west side of the third floor was locked. I didn't want money. I wanted an original document from 2006, kept in that room.