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It was her heartbeat that was loud, her breathing, her coat rustling, that was important. Diana knew it had to be, she could feel that it was, signs that she was there, in the bedroom, with her. Signs she had come back, when she had said she would, which, duh, of course she came back, she said so. But, so many others had said so, too, and they had not. Come back, that was, as they had said it. Perhaps even meant it.

Maggie had meant it. She did not seem loose with her words. Tight, in fact, or, not tight. Tight was not good, and Maggie was good with her words. She knew them very well, big ones, too. She was just very precise with them. She chose them with thought and care and she never spoke too many at once or in a row or this way and that. They were all very good words, and she spoke them with confidence and conviction. Nothing like how Diana spoke, but she wanted very much to speak like her, if only she could arrange her words in neat lines and know which ones were hers and which were monogramed neatly with someone else’s initials.

Diana was getting better at knowing what was who’s and hers, and Maggie had wanted to help. Mysteries were her specialty, or so she had proclaimed. Confidence and conviction. Diana had agreed they were, though she had thought beforehand that her specialty was ocular enlargement and petty arson. An easy mistake to make.

It was the fifth time she had come back. The last time, Maggie had read her, parts of her, thumbing through her pages, ruffling her edges, magnifying glass held to her every inked word, exposing her. It had left her red in the face, freckles disappearing into a full flush as she was gently closed with the care of someone who had spent her whole life handling books.

That time was a follow up, a consultation, but it was not Diana sauntering into a slat-lit hazy office emblazoned on the door with M. M. Glassbury, P.I. with a matching metal plaque on a desk. Maggie would come to see her, accustomed to making her way around the house in a way Diana was simply not. Still, Diana tried to hold herself with the confidence of a dangerous woman with a cigarette holder between two fingers and a fur coat draped over her shoulders. Her paper skirt ruffled as she stood straighter. No blood under her nails or blackmail catalogued in the back of her mind.

Diana was no femme fatale, but that did not stop the detective doing her job.

“After last time I took the liberty of consulting the human on a few matters regarding your memories, to cross-reference against her entries,” said Maggie, getting comfortable on the bed. She no longer expected Diana to sit with her, smiling up at her encouragingly as she continued, “She writes very dry, but you recall things with an almost poetic focus on detail.”

“Poetry rhymes, I never rhyme, and even if I do, I never mean to,” Diana insisted, chin in the air most defiantly.

Without looking she could hear Maggie’s smile as she asked, “Can you recount the shower memory for me again?”

They had gone over it last time. Only once, and she had got her tenses confused with her senses and she had ended up spiralling quite literally down the drain. Metaphorically, not literally. She would not go there again. She would get it right.

Slowly, purposefully, Diana recalled, “Steam, the whole house was filled with it, I couldn’t see out the windows, I could barely see across the room. I was in the dining room. Open. My pages, curling, breathing impossible. The sound of the water, the pipes squealing. I’ve never been wet before. All over soapy hot wet. I’ve been salty wet, like the ocean but sad, crinkling my pages and smudging my ink, good ink, fresh ink, fresh tears, like mascara running down my cheeks, my mascara but not my tears.”

“Do you remember what happened after the steam?” Maggie was not writing anything down. Diana was grateful, but in her ears she could still hear a pen scratching. She could feel the nib on her skin. She shook it off, and shook her head.

“No,” Diana stated firmly, but she touched her chin and corrected, “maybe? I was...scared. I never got to see much of the house, it was the dresser or in the bag to leave. It was loud. I could hear so many people. I could hear you.”

Maggie blinked, staring up at Diana with a quizzical, pressing expression. “Me?”

“Whining, no, wiping, you were wiping your lens, it made a real low sound and then a squeak, really drawn out, like, squeeeak, and I could see, kind of, from across the room. It was the first time I saw you. Not at the antique shop, not on the glass shelf with the lowlight sunlight stained-glass-lamplight shining through your lens, there, in the dining room through the steam. I remember that.”

“Incredible,” Maggie breathed, standing from the bed and suddenly nose to nose with Diana.

It was not often Diana was looked at. Certainly not with such wide, curious eyes, vibrantly blue, bespectacled and prying. She felt like there was something on her she could not see, words etched on her arms she had not read, like there was some great riddle written right across her forehead and Maggie was intent on figuring it out.

Figuring her out, and Diana winced, asking sharply, “Am I a puzzle to you? A pretty puzzle missing half its pieces? Incomplete, unsolvable, incorrigible for having the audacity to exist beyond the bounds of the edge pieces.”

“I love puzzles,” Maggie started, gentle and easy as the hand that came up to hold Diana’s arm, “but, you’re not a puzzle, Diana. People aren’t puzzles, even if that would make things a lot easier.”

“Am I?”

“Are you what? Easy?”

“People,” Diana said, head tilting.

Those ocean-reflecting-the-sky blue eyes regarded her, less curious, maybe sad, and Maggie said after a brief moment, “I think so.”

“You think so? Do I think so?” Diana asked, hand fluttering to her collarbone. She looked down at herself, and then at Maggie, words coming again before she could think ahead of them, “I’m a diary, but, am I also a person? Am I her? Or me? I’m a her, I think, but not her.”

The her in question had hung over each of Maggie’s visits, a spectral presence despite her absence. A part of Diana that they were slowly excising, a delicate procedure that required utmost care and absolute precision. A sharp, honed analytical mind, softened by compassion, and that was what Maggie had offered; what she would continue to provide.

“Am I?” asked Maggie, as if to stump her.

“Of course you are,” Diana blurted out. “At least I hope you are, it would be a little weird to have a crush on you if you weren’t, silly.”

“Diana,” Maggie breathed, but she was quickly talked over.

“Not that I wouldn’t if you weren’t, but you are, or, would it only be weird if I wasn’t? So I must be! Right?”

“That seems like sound evidence to me, but-”

“Uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh?”

“Buts are never good. They come with contrariwise, alike and hark, what news but bad following hence a but.”

“Think of it less like that and more as a diverging path,” Maggie suggested.

“I know about those, the ones in the yellow wood, or was it a road?” Diana mused, lips pursing in contemplation.

Maggie sighed, stepping in front of her so she entirely obscured her view as she said, plainly and with some insistence, “Diana, you said you have a crush on me.”

“I did, I do, or,” - no, it was not the human that had put those words in her - “I do. I definitely do have a crush on you.”

“Right! Well, okay, yes. Yes, that’s good.”

“Good? No, of course it’s good, it makes me feel good, but, good to you? For you? Us?” Diana stared at Maggie, watching the flush creep across her cheeks.

“Having a desire of your own that’s new is a good start,” encouraged Maggie.

“Not for you, or, us, or, there is no us. That’s me, just me,” Diana sighed, casting her eyes away.

“I never said that.” Maggie again stepped into Diana’s line of sight, refusing to let her look away.

Batting her eyelashes, knowingly or not, Diana stated, “So it is good, for you I mean. And me, definitely good for me, but us, too? Us two?”

“If you want there to be an us, there could be,” Maggie told her, smiling for her in that painfully earnest way that made Diana’s whole body shake like butterflies in a windstorm.

“I’m only just an I, me, instead of we, them, her, not me, but this is an us that isn’t one. Us, separate? But together? I’m me and you’re you, but we’re us, and still me and you. Us. An item? No, we are that, each, but-”

“How about we try another word, one that doesn’t have as many connotations. How about...partners?”

“Partner.” Diana mimicked tipping her fascinator like a cowboy hat, before righting herself, shaking her head, “No, too silly, and, too serious? If serious is good, then, just serious enough? Maybe still too silly, partner. Partner. Partner in crime. No! You solve crimes, not commit them.”

Giggling, Maggie suggested instead, “Girlfriends?”

“Girlfriends, girl friends, girlfriends, I know this one. Girlfriends are summer, and sugarcane and sunset moonlight goodnights on the beach, cherry-lime ligloss and a foot pop with a kiss, warm, breezy, casette-tape mixtape road trip that never ends hands under your shirt in the backseat of your Jeep. Sand, sand where it shouldn’t be, and you laugh and laugh,” Diana trailed off. She looked at Maggie, a smile that was at once faraway and right there on her lips as she told her, “You snort when you laugh.”

“Do I?” Maggie knew she did. She also knew how to calm Diana out of her words.

“You do. It’s adorable,” Diana said with a nod, an authority on the matter, clearly.

Maggie only barely stopped herself giving one such laugh as she pressed, “You like girlfriends then?”

“Girlfriends, we can be girlfriends. We can make it new memories, you don’t smell like coconut sunscreen or exhaust.”

“I’d like that,” Maggie admitted, earnest smile curling almost deviously. She held Diana by the elbows, drawing her in as she said, “We could make one right now.”

“Can we? Should we? We should, so it feels and smells like you, tastes like you. What do you taste like?”

“I can show you.”

“Okay,” Diana nodded with a great measure of enthusiasm.

Her giddy smile and tumbling laughter were smothered by Maggie’s lips, soft and pliable against her own. The hands on her elbows gripped her biceps, holding her in place, but Diana could not imagine what for, as she could not have moved had she wanted to, and she did not want to, not for anything.