The delivery book lived in a drawer under the register, a cheap spiral notebook I'd never thought to call a record until Nolan's photograph made me start treating every page like it might matter. Tess pulled it out before I asked her to, which told me she'd been thinking about the same morning I had.
"What date was on his picture," she said.
I checked the courier envelope. August the eleventh, the year before last, early, the timestamp read six-forty. I flipped the delivery book back to that week and ran my finger down the column of addresses in my own handwriting, half expecting to find Tess's initials next to the route that passed that entrance.
They weren't there. Mine were.
"That's me," I said, and heard how strange it sounded out loud, like I'd caught myself instead of her. "I ran that route myself that week. You were out, your car was in the shop, remember, and I covered the east side deliveries for three days."
Tess put one finger beside my initials. “So you made the delivery near that door. That doesn't mean the picture shows you.” She pulled the photograph closer, then stopped herself. “We still can't tell that part.”
“No. There's no person or object in that corner I can identify.” I turned the book so she could read the whole line: the diner two doors down, the quantities, my initials. “The book gives us the route and date. I remember making those deliveries. It doesn't prove I was at that entrance at six-forty.” Tess checked the next two days, where I'd covered again. The entries agreed with the car trouble we both remembered. That was useful. It wasn't a photograph becoming clear.
"So tell him that."
I sat with that longer than I expected to. Telling Nolan the truth meant placing myself, not Tess, in the frame he was so interested in, which could just as easily give him a different complaint to raise, a different name to hold against the lease. There was a kind of relief in realizing the shape in that photograph might never be identified by either of us, and a kind of fear in realizing that not knowing hadn't stopped me, for one entire evening, from almost deciding it had to be evidence of something.
"It unsettles me," I said, mostly to myself, "how close I came to doing to myself what I wouldn't let him do to you. I looked at a smudge and wanted it to mean something, just because meaning something would have been easier than not knowing."
"But you didn't decide it meant something."
"Not this time. I checked the book instead."
I laid the letter beside the notebook before sealing it. The route on that date was mine, according to our delivery record; the customer was two doors from the pictured entrance. I remembered making the delivery but could not establish its exact minute or identify the object in the still. Tess read each statement against the page while I copied the entry, including the neighboring lines so it wouldn't look plucked out of nowhere. I kept the original book. Nolan could have the limited correction, not an answer we'd manufactured to make his question go away.
Tess read the letter before I sealed it and handed it back without comment, which from her was close enough to approval. I mailed it myself, on the way to Daywheel, and spent the walk wondering whether I'd just handed Nolan a reason to suspect me instead of her, and deciding that if that was the price of not asking her to carry something that was never hers to carry, it was a price I'd pay without complaint.