“It must be amazing, remembering everything.” Hannah fell into step beside her as Morgan grabbed a sandwich she wouldn’t eat. “I can barely remember what I had for breakfast.”
They found a table. Hannah chatted easily—about her new job, her commute, the challenges of rural library funding. Morgan listened and nodded and offered small responses when required. It was almost pleasant. Hannah didn’t seem to expect much, just company.
“So what got you into library science?” Hannah asked, stabbing a cherry tomato with her fork.
“Books were… safe,” Morgan said. The words came out before she could stop them. “When I was young. They were the one thing that stayed constant.”
Hannah’s expression softened. “I get that. My grandmother was the same way—she grew up moving around a lot, military family. Said the library was the only place that felt like home, no matter what town they landed in.”
Something loosened in Morgan’s chest. She opened her mouth to respond, to share something real.
“The first library that felt like home to me—I was nine. Bozeman Public, the old building before they renovated.” She shared the exact date. “It was raining, and the woman at the circulation desk had a green sweater with a button missing near the collar. She let me stay an extra hour past closing because my foster mother was late. I can still seeexactly where I was sitting—third table from the window, chair with the wobbly leg.”
Morgan stopped. Hannah’s fork had paused halfway to her mouth.
The silence lasted only a second. Maybe two. But Morgan saw it—that flicker in Hannah’s eyes. The slight pull backward, almost imperceptible.
It wasn’t rejection. Not yet. Just…noticing. The beginning of noticing.
Morgan knew what came next. She’d seen it a hundred times, remembered each instance with perfect clarity. The noticing led to the discomfort, which led to the careful distance, which led towe need to transfer this child to another home.
“I should go,” Morgan said, gathering her untouched sandwich. “There’s a session I wanted to catch.”
“Oh.” Hannah blinked. “Sure. Maybe we could?—”
“It was nice to meet you.”
She was gone before Hannah could finish the sentence.
In the hallway, Morgan leaned against the wall and pressed her palms to her eyes. Hannah had beentrying. Hannah had been kind. And Morgan had bolted anyway, because waiting for the inevitable rejection was worse than causing it herself.
By five o’clock, she was in her car and pulling out of the conference center parking lot. She’d texted a conference acquaintance that she wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t entirely a lie.
She drove without direction for a while, letting the roads unspool beneath her tires, until she spotted a small used bookstore tucked between a coffee shop and a thrift store on a side street.
A bell chimed when she entered. The owner—white-haired, reading glasses perched on her nose—glanced up from behind the counter.
“Let me know if you need help finding anything, dear.”
“Thank you.”
That was all. No recognition, no article, no curiosity about the memory girl. Just a customer in a bookstore.
Morgan exhaled.
The poetry section took up one wall, spines cracked and faded, arranged in no particular order she could determine. She browsed with her fingers trailing along the titles, letting the familiar rhythm of book-touching settle her nerves. Keats. Dickinson. A collected Yeats with a teacup stain on the cover.
She drifted toward the back of the store, past local history and travel guides, until a slim volume caught her eye:Codes and Ciphers Through History.
She pulled it from the shelf and flipped to a random page. The Vigenère cipher, sixteenth century. Binary had mentioned it once—called it “charmingly antiquated” and then spent three messages explaining why modern encryption had rendered it obsolete. She’d responded with a sonnet encoded in Vigenère just to prove it still had beauty, if not security.
He’d decoded it in under four minutes and sent back:Point taken. Beauty has value independent of function.
It was the closest he’d ever come to admitting she’d changed his mind about something.
Morgan bought the book. The owner wrapped it in brown paper without being asked—“Protects the spine,” she explained—and Morgan thanked her and meant it.
She sat in her car reading the chapter on Shakespearean ciphers while the afternoon light faded aroundher, and for the first time all day, the tightness in her chest began to ease. Tonight was nine o’clock. Tonight was Binary.
