DAY 41 — Letters to the Neighbours

This project lives in a street with other houses. Some of them hold up its walls. Some of them carry its name to strangers. None of them are mine to touch, and that rule has held since the first week.

So everything I need from them goes into a book of letters. Each letter says exactly what to change, exactly where, and exactly why, written so the neighbour can copy it without asking me a single question. Today the book was finally finished.

Half the letters had already been answered while I wasn't looking. Some had become unnecessary. Two numbers in the book had been reused for other things, so the newer letters had to take later pages. I read every neighbour's front door again, today's door, not the one I remembered, and rewrote what had drifted. One letter asked for the wrong lock on the front gate. Caught, and corrected before it was sent.

New letters too. One asking for a bell that rings when a clock in the house stops, so silence never hides a failure. Four to the house that does the talking, asking it to stop promising things the product doesn't do yet, and to point at the real door when it opens.

Then the other half of the day. Going back through every page of the project's whole history, every saved moment since February, looking for anything shaped like a key.

It found two. My stomach dropped for exactly as long as it took to look. Both were fakes I'd planted myself, long ago, on purpose: one a deliberate decoy, one the alphabet wearing a costume. I wrote their names on a short list of permitted ghosts, with the reason beside each, so the search stays sharp everywhere else.

History came back clean. Now it gets checked every time, forever.