The Other Typist

by Suzanne Rindell

On that particular day, she entered very calmly and quietly, but I knew: It was like the eye of a hurricane. She was the dark epicenter of something we didn’t quite understand yet, the place where hot and cold mixed dangerously, and around her everything would change.

It was a paradox of innocent surprise and devilish complicity that proved intoxicating to everyone who heard it, and I wonder sometimes—even now—whether that voice was something she had carefully crafted over the years or if she had simply been born with it.

I can only say we are all susceptible to blind spots when exposed to the right dazzling flash.

Perhaps that is cruel of me to say. It’s just that I have encountered a number of cockatoos, but have met very few humans who preen quite as much as Helen did.

I am so plain, in fact, that I am almost remarkably so. Having been in the police business for a couple of years now and knowing something about the nature of eyewitness reports, I am fairly confident that I could commit any number of crimes and get off scot-free, simply by virtue of being utterly unmemorable to a witness.

They say fact is often stranger than fiction, but if you ask me, I believe truth has always been much more disappointing on this score.

The prospect of a woman succumbing to the labor pains of childbirth while at the precinct made the men more queasy than anything a suspected murderer could possibly recount.

You see, doubt is a magnificently difficult pest of which to try and rid oneself, and is worse than any other kind of infestation. It can creep in quietly and through the tiniest of cracks, and once inside, it is almost impossible to ever completely remove.

There is a reason they say God is in the details. It is the precious details that can prove your innocence, and it is the vicious details that can get you hanged.

Sometimes the truth of a situation was about more than simply uncovering the facts; it was about choosing allegiances.

Teddy was trying to get the factual truth of her history, while I was trying to get the sentimental truth of her heart, but really we were not so very different creatures. We had both chased after Odalie and were now waiting for her to dictate the circumstances and outcome of the interaction.

The heart is a funny organ, with such stubborn biases.