Lincoln stopped breathing.
Question marks. If she was writing down memories, why was she using question marks?
Morgan Reece—who had recited their entire first exchange from perfect memory, who could quote every book she’d ever read, who had been kidnapped specificallybecause she never forgot anything—was using question marks.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m losing them.” Her voice was barely audible. She still wasn’t looking at him.
“I’m losing my good memories.” She finally raised her eyes. Red-rimmed. Swollen. She’d been crying for a while—alone, in the dark, while he slept three rooms away. “I keep trying to remember Ms. Delacroix’s face. The exact color of her eyes, the way her smile looked when she was proud of me. And it’s…” She swallowed. “Fuzzy. Like looking through water.”
Lincoln lowered himself onto the ottoman across from her. The distance between them felt wrong now. A few hours ago, there had been no distance at all. She’d been wrapped around him, and he’d thought?—
He’d thought they’d reached something. Together.
But she’d been carrying this. Even then. Even while they held each other. She’d known her mind was failing and hadn’t told him, and he understood why—some fears were too big to say out loud—but the thought of her suffering in silence made his chest ache.
“So you’re writing your memories down?”
Morgan flipped to a fresh page. Her pen trembled over the paper.
“I’m going to write the first letter Ms. Delacroix ever sent me. I was fourteen. I’ve recited it to myself hundreds of times.”
She started writing.
My dearest Morgan?—
The pen stopped.
“My dearest Morgan,” she whispered. “I wanted to write because…because I…”
Her face contorted. Her eyes squeezed shut. She wasreaching for something—he could see the effort of it, the strain of trying to grasp something that kept slipping away.
“I know there’s more. I can feel it, the rhythm of her words, but the actual—” Her voice cracked. “She wrote about believing in myself. Something about potential. She drew a little star in the margin. The paper smelled like her perfume. Iknowall of this, but I can’t?—”
The pen clattered to the floor.
Morgan pressed both hands against her face, and the sound she made was the worst thing Lincoln had ever heard. Not quite a sob. Something rawer. The sound of someone watching themselves disappear.
“It’s the data.” Muffled. Broken. “Everything Randall put in my head. It’s taking up space. Crowding everything else out. My brain has limits I never knew about, and his information is pushing my real memories out to make room.”
Lincoln stared at the notebook. AtMy dearest Morganin shaky handwriting. At the blank space where a lifetime of love should have been.
He thought about his servers. His redundant backups. The elaborate architecture he’d built to ensure nothing was ever lost.
He thought about what it would feel like to reach for a file and find it corrupted. To watch your own data degrade, byte by byte, replaced by garbage you never wanted.
“I’ve never forgotten anything.” Morgan dropped her hands. Her face was devastated—wet, blotchy, stripped of every defense. “Not once in twenty-eight years. I don’t know who I am without my memory.”
You’re still you, he wanted to say.You’re still Morgan. Still brave. Still kind. Still the woman who sent coordinates in a poem when she had nothing else.
But that wasn’t what she needed to hear.
“What would help?” The words came out rough. “What do you need?”
She was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice had gone small. Young.
“Ms. Delacroix wrote me letters. When I was in foster care. When I was lonely. When I needed someone to remind me I wasn’t broken.” She picked up the notebook, stared at those three inadequate words. “I kept every one. Filed them away in my apartment. Never opened them again because I didn’t need to—I had them memorized perfectly.”
