“Obviously.”
For a moment, it almost felt like we were back in college, fresh-faced, playful, easily amused. This was what had made the relationship so hard to leave. Not the things that had changed throughout the years, but the things that had stayed perfectly the same.
Setting down the cup, I stretched my limbs on the chair and asked somewhat unconsciously, “Do you have a cigarette?”
He frowned then, and I felt myself mirror the expression as I slowly realized my request, the mindless reflex of it.
“Since when do you smoke?” he asked.
I shook my head, touching my fingers to my mouth. “I don’t know. I did in there. I mean everyone did. It was a different time.”
With shadowed eyes, sharply, he pronounced, “You mean a different reality.”
“Right,” I breathed out. “Sorry. Yes.”
“Are you sure you’re alright, Ann?”
“Yeah. Just confused, I guess,” I said, and when Theo didn’t stop staring at me, I added, “They warned me about this. It will take some time for my mind to sort out what is real and what is not.”
“This is fucking insane,” he hissed, straightening to his full height. “You should have accepted the memory deletion.”
“No,” was my unshakable, immediate reply, for this was the only thing I was absolutely certain of. “I don’t want to forget who I was in there.”
Theo let out another trembling exhalation, surprising me again by relenting the argument. Striding toward the door, without turning, he muttered, “You can sleep here. I’ll take the guest room.”
“Theo?”
“What?”
“Thank you again. For everything.”
“Yeah, don’t mention it,” he clipped, withdrawing from me in a sense that had nothing to do with physical proximity.
But then, just as I reclaimed my phone, he called, “Ann?”
“Mm?”
Looking at me, very softly, he said, “You know I love you, right? I will always love you. Regardless.”
And despite everything, I felt myself smile, genuinely smile, knowing what he meant. “I know,” I assured him. “I will always love you too. Regardless.”
???
In the dim, melancholy lamplight, I tried once again to get past the strange tactility of the phone’s screen and type out the words.
Kai Alwyn Park.
The first result to pop up on the interface was not a social media page, a profile account, a professional website, or a record of any sort. The first result available was a local news article dated four years ago, meaning exactly two years before Kai joined the Program, the title screaming at me:
Renowned chef and restaurant owner Kai Alwyn Park loses wife in tragic accident.
I didn’t know what was more shocking. The fact that Kai was a real person, after all, existing in the same world and timeline as I did; the fact that he had been married; or the fact that I actually knew of him already. Not as Kai, of course, but as Alwyn-Park, or rather the Crusader, because that was how Theo used to call him. Because one of Theo’s college buddies had been the one to handle that case. That grief-stricken man and his vengeful mission to sue literally every person who’d been responsible for his wife’s death. The truck driver who’d been looking at his phone and had run the stop sign, the company the driver had been working for, the car company his wife had been using because one of the air bags had proven to be faulty.
I swear the guy is insane,Theo had told me after hearing about the case.
Or maybe he really loved his wife,I’d argued.
Yeah, but isn’t that what memory deletion is for? To forget when things like this happen?
