The studio reorganized two weeks ago. I've started this post four times since, and I'm going to keep this one short, because the long versions were all about me, and it isn't about me.

Some of my friends were let go. Good people, people who taught me things, people who have been there longer than I have. I won't say who, or how many, or how it was done. It isn't my story to tell, and some of them read this. I'll only say that they found out on a Tuesday morning, and most of them were packed by lunch, and that's a very short time to fit years into a cardboard box.

I kept my job. So did my whole team, nearly, and I don't know why, and nobody is going to tell me. I've been in meetings all week about what the new structure means for the work, and I've nodded, and taken notes, and thought about a desk across the floor that's empty now, with a ring on it from a mug that sat in the same place for six years.

The feeling I have is guilt, and I know it's the wrong feeling, because I didn't choose anything. People keep telling me that, kindly, and they're right. It doesn't help. It's the guilt of walking out of a building that's fallen down and finding you're not hurt. You look around for someone to apologize to.

What I've been doing instead of apologizing is writing letters. By hand, to the people who left, to their home addresses, which I had because we've sent each other cards. Nothing useful. Not "let me know if I can help," because everyone says that and nobody knows what it means. Just a page about what they were like to work beside. Something they could keep, if they wanted.

Three have written back already. One said the letter was the only thing anyone gave her that week that didn't come with a form to sign.

I'm going back in on Tuesday. The desk will still be empty.

It's just past nine and there's still light in the sky over the Sound, the long blue kind that lasts until nearly ten. In a month it'll be gone by eight. But tonight the windows are open and somebody down the block is playing a trumpet badly and the swifts are still out, and I'm not going to turn on a lamp until I have to.

Seattle summers are what we get in exchange for November. Everyone here knows the deal. From the beginning of July until the rain comes back, the city lives outdoors like it's afraid of being caught inside. Volunteer Park is full every evening until dark, blankets end to end, people reading and arguing and pretending not to be asleep. I walked up there after dinner tonight and sat on the steps by the water tower and watched the light go orange on the reservoir.

Duluth has long days too, about the same as here, give or take. But they felt different growing up, because of the lake. Here the long evening is warm. There, even in July, the evening came up off the water with a cold edge to it, and you went down to Park Point in a sweatshirt and came home with sand in your socks and the sky still light behind you. My mother calls it "cooler by the lake," the way the weather on the radio does, as if it were a separate town.

My father was on the boats in summer. The shipping season runs from spring until the ice, so the long days were the days he was gone longest. I remember lying in bed with the sky still light at ten, on a school night, and listening for a horn from the harbor and knowing it wasn't his boat, and waiting anyway. I don't think I've ever told my mother that. I think she knows.

They say it'll be in the nineties here this week, which this city is not built for. I've bought a second fan and I'll complain about it with everyone else. But tonight it's perfect, and I'm going to sit here until the last of it goes.

On New Year's Eve, Jonah told me in the comments to read Dorothy L. Sayers, starting with Strong Poison and not stopping before Gaudy Night. I did as I was told. I finished Gaudy Night on Thursday, on the bus home, and missed my stop, and walked back up the hill in the rain not minding at all.

If you haven't read them: Harriet Vane is a detective novelist. In Strong Poison she's on trial for poisoning her lover, and Lord Peter Wimsey, who's investigating, falls in love with her across a courtroom and proposes on his first visit to her in prison. She says no. She keeps saying no, for years and two more books. In Gaudy Night, published in 1935, she goes back to her old women's college at Oxford for a reunion dinner, the Gaudy of the title, and finds the place being quietly tormented by someone writing poison-pen letters. She stays to find out who.

It's a mystery, and a good one. But it's really about a question Harriet can't stop asking: whether a woman can have work she loves and a person she loves, without one of them eating the other. The college is full of women who chose the work, some happily and some not. Outside it are women who chose the other thing, some happily and some not. Harriet has spent years being told, by the world and by her own past, that she'll have to pick. What Sayers does, slowly and with enormous patience, is let her find out whether that's true.

I'm not going to say how it ends, though anyone who's read it knows the two words in Latin I mean.

I'll just say that I recognized more of myself in Harriet than I'd have liked. Not the trial. The habit of guarding the work as if anyone who came close might take it. The way she can't quite believe that someone could want her to keep writing. I've never been asked to choose between the two things, exactly. I've only noticed, at eleven at night, which one I'm still at the desk for.

Sayers was writing about it in 1935, and I'm reading her on a bus in 2022, nodding. I'm not sure whether that's comforting.

What book have you read that seemed to know something about you it had no business knowing?

I've been writing a companion this year. That's a character who travels with the player, comments on things, has opinions about the player's choices and a story of their own that unfolds along the way. I can't say much more about them. I can say they're the most work I've ever put into one person, and the work is mostly in one thing: they remember.

Not everything. That would be impossible, and it would also be a little frightening. But they remember the things a friend would. Who you spared. Who you didn't. What you said to them three towns ago when they asked you a hard question and you made a joke instead. Hours later, at a fire somewhere, they bring it up. Not to judge you. Just to show that it landed somewhere.

From the writing side, this is mostly bookkeeping. A long list of things the game notices, and a much longer list of lines for each of them, most of which any given player will never hear. I spend whole days writing reactions to choices I'd guess one player in ten makes. It's unglamorous, and it's the best part of the job I have right now.

What I didn't expect was what it does to people. We ran a playtest last month, and I watched one player (through glass, with his permission) reach a scene where the companion brings up something he'd done near the start, almost in passing. He stopped playing. He took his hands off the controller and sat back. Then he leaned in to the microphone on the desk and said, quite clearly, "Sorry," to a character on a screen. Nobody had asked him to. There's no option for it.

Afterward he said he'd forgotten he'd done it, and the character hadn't, and that made it feel as if it had really happened. I've thought about that sentence every day since.

I think being remembered is one of the things we want most and get least. A game can give someone that cheaply, with a list and some lines. I'm not sure what I think about that yet, except that it works far better than it should, and that I'm the one keeping the list.

Has a game, or a book, or a person, ever brought up something you'd forgotten you did?

My mother's cast came off on Tuesday. She has a brace now, and a list of exercises with a rubber ball, and a wrist that does about half of what she tells it to. She can't hold a pen for more than a word or two. So for the last month I've been writing her letters for her.

She calls on Sunday afternoons with the letters she owes, and I sit at my kitchen table with a pad, and she dictates. Her correspondence is larger than I knew. A librarian she worked with in the eighties who retired to Arizona. A cousin of my father's in Wisconsin. Two former students, now grown, now with children, who still write to her at Christmas and on her birthday. A woman from church who moved to her daughter's in Rochester and is lonely. My mother answers every one, and she was not going to let a wrist interfere with that, so she has drafted me.

She dictates the punctuation. I'd forgotten she does that. "Comma. New paragraph. No, a period, she'll think I'm rushing her." She spells any name she thinks I might get wrong, including ones I've known all my life. And she does not want my help with the sentences. Several times I've offered a better word, out of habit, and she's said "No," and then, after a pause, "Read it back," and then, "No." Once I suggested cutting a sentence that said the same thing as the one before it. She said that was the sentence that mattered, and that the person reading it would know why. I left it in. I don't know why, and I suspect I'm not meant to.

I write in other people's voices for a living. I've written old soldiers and children and a queen. I thought I knew my mother's voice better than any of them. I knew how she talks to me. It turns out she talks to a lonely woman in Rochester quite differently: more slowly, and more gently, and with more jokes. I didn't know she was that funny with other people. I'm a little jealous, honestly.

At the bottom of each letter, she has me add a line in brackets: "Written by my daughter, who has my permission but not my handwriting." Then I mail them from Seattle, which must be very confusing for the post office and for the woman in Rochester.

The brace comes off in a few weeks. I'll miss Sundays like this more than I'll admit to her.

Have you ever written something in someone else's words, and learned who they were from it?