"Your file tells me what the police documented. I'm asking what you remember."
"That's the point. I don't."
He sets the tablet down. Folds his hands. The posture is patient but the patience is a tool, not a kindness.
"The incident report from your final placement describes a body found in the basement of your group home. Male, seventeen. Bite wounds to the throat, chest, and forearms. Tissue damage inconsistent with human dentition. Blood evidence suggesting the attack lasted between fifteen and twenty minutes."
He recites it flat. No emphasis. Like he's reading the weather.
"You were found at the scene. Covered in the victim's blood. No defensive wounds on your body. No DNA under your fingernails. No evidence of a weapon."
He waits. Watching me process it.
No defensive wounds. That's the detail that gets people. If I was attacked — if whatever happened in that basement was something that happened to me — there should have been cuts on my hands, bruises on my arms, skin under my nails. Something to say I fought back.
There was nothing. Just his blood on my skin and my body untouched underneath it.
"The bite impressions were analyzed by three separate forensic teams," Gavin continues. "None of them could match the dental pattern to a known species. Two flagged the wound depth as impossible for a human jaw to produce. The third refused to submit a finding."
I know all of this. I've read the reports — the ones I was allowed to see and the ones I wasn't. I know what the forensic analyst said. I know the phrase that's followed me through every placement since: bite impressions inconsistent with human dentition. Nobody knows what to do with that sentence, so they just keep passing it along with my file.
"Four hours," Gavin says. "You left the common area at approximately eight PM. You were found in the basementat midnight. Four hours unaccounted for. What do you remember?"
The basement. The dark. The smell of blood — hot, copper-bright, everywhere. And underneath the horror and the blankness, something I have never once said out loud:
It smelled familiar.
Not new. Not shocking. Familiar. Like my body recognized the scene before my brain could process it. Like whatever happened in those four hours was something I'd done before, something encoded in muscle and bone, something that lived in a part of me I don't have access to.
"Nothing," I say. "I remember going downstairs. I remember the lights were off. And then I was on the floor and there were cops."
"Four hours. And nothing in between."
"Nothing."
"Do you believe that?"
The question lands different than I expected. Not do you expect me to believe that — every cop and counselor asks that version. Do you believe that. Like my own conviction is the variable he's measuring.
"Yes," I say. And it's true. And it's the most terrifying truth I own, because the alternative — that I do remember, that it's in there somewhere, that four hours of my life contain something my brain walled off to protect me — is worse than the blank.
Gavin watches me for a long moment. His face gives me nothing. Then he picks up the tablet again.
"Have you ever experienced unusual physical symptoms? Elevated body temperature. Heightened senses — smell, hearing, vision. Involuntary muscle contractions. Pain in the jaw, hands, or spine that doesn't correspond to an injury."
My left wrist aches. Right on cue. I don't look at it.
"No."
"Rapid healing? Injuries that resolved faster than expected?"
I think about the split lip I got in my third placement that was gone by morning. The bruised ribs from a fight in juvie that stopped hurting after six hours. The deep cut on my palm from a broken window that I watched close itself while I sat in a bathroom stall trying not to pass out.
"No."
"Unusual emotional responses? Aggression disproportionate to stimulus. Protectiveness toward strangers. A compulsion to respond to perceived threats with physical force."
Every single one. Every single one of those. My whole life.
