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“Surely,” he said after a moment, when all she did was gaze at the photographs on the mantel above the fireplace, most featuring a green-eyed baby, “you will tell me who you are. And who I am, while you’re at it.”

He could see the pulse in her neck, moving perhaps more quickly than it should have. She seemed to be gripping her mug a little too tightly. It appeared to require strength on her part to look away from the series of framed photographs.

“My name is Aeryn Bridgers,” she told him, and he got the impression she was bracing herself as she said that. No doubt waiting for that name to be like a key into a lock. He felt himself waiting for that moment too, but it didn’t come. “I manage collections in a broad sense and curate specific collections at an art museum here.” She paused. “In case you don’t know where here is, you’ve managed to make it to Chicago, Illinois, in the middle of one of our winter storms. That’s in the United States of America, if you’re blurry on that, too.”

He was blurry on all of it. He had the sense he was looking through a clouded window, and could see shapes that resonated inside of him—but when he tried to focus in on them, they turned to ash.

“We do not have the same accent,” he said after a moment, because it was more concrete. A fact that did not require he press his face against that clouded glass in his mind.

“No,” she said, and he thought he saw something wry in her gaze then. “We most certainly do not.”

“Do I know other languages, then?” he asked. But even as she nodded, he found that he did. “I don’t know who I am,” he said. In French. Italian. German. Greek. And several others as well. He blinked. “I believe I’m quite fluent.”

She nodded, still with that wry look about her. “You are. You’re an extraordinarily well-educated man, though I’m not convinced fluency is connected to intelligence or education. I think of it more like having perfect pitch. You either have a facility for language or you don’t.” She blinked, as if she’d caught herself going off on a tangent, and had forgotten that he couldn’t follow her. “Still, you have an unusually high degree of wealth, sophistication, taste, and consequence.”

He considered that. “That does not sound like the sort of man who normally finds himself wandering around a city in a snowstorm without access to his memories.”

“No indeed.”

He gestured around the room, from the festive Christmas tree to the gas fire to the old moldings and lovingly restored ceilings. “This seems a well-appointed sort of home. Does that mean that you have an equal level of… What did you call it? Education, wealth, taste, sophistication, and so on?”

“No,” she replied after a moment. Then she gazed around the room they sat in, as if seeing it for the first time. “But those things are involved, certainly. Indirectly, for the most part.” When he only gazed back at her, not following, she swallowed. “As for who you are, I can’t really answer that. You’re a man of many names, and several faces, to match. I could tell you who I think you are, but I’m not at all certain that would be helpful. You and I should never have met. And because of that, I have come to think that just maybe, the man I thought you were never existed.”

He laughed at that. “I wouldn’t know the difference.”

She looked almost stunned, he thought. As if his laughter had thrown her.

“Sometimes,” she offered quietly, “I called you V.”

V, he thought. It was as good as anything. It was better than white noise and blurred windows.

“That will do,” V said, and having a name to attach to, however little he recognized it, made him feel better. “But you know me.”

“That is a matter of opinion,” she said, again in that wry tone that bordered on sardonic.

But V was not playing games, trapped as he was by that wall inside him. “You do, do you not? Because I know…” He shook his head, even though it made his temples throb in protest. “I know your face. I recognize your voice. Surely we have met before.”

There was some strange emotion in her gaze then, so intense it almost hurt to look upon her. “We have met before,” she said, after a moment. Her voice raw and something like grudging.

She settled back against the couch, and pulled her legs up beneath her. She propped the mug of tea on the back of the cushion in front of her and looked down at it, as if figuring out the construction of a ceramic mug was of utmost importance.

“I’ll tell you a story,” she told him after a few moments had rolled past. “And if any of it sounds familiar, you can let me know. Okay?”

“I would be grateful,” he said, and inclined his head.

Once again, she looked startled, and V wondered if he was echoing some moment he couldn’t remember, but she could. If he was somehow reminding her of whatever version she knew of the man he’d been.

He wanted to shout at her, or at the walls, and shake loose his own memories, but he did not feel that would be productive. And besides, she had said she would tell him a story. She had suggested he would take part in it, so it was up to him to remember what he could.

If he could.

She blew out a breath that sounded shaky. “Five years ago, I was chosen to curate a collection of art in a foreign country. It was a very prestigious appointment, and I was young for it, but the collection in question was focused on a painter little known outside his country of origin. Who I happen to have concentrated on in my graduate work.”

Aeryn darted a glance his way and he kept his face impassive. Or thought he did, since the face in question didn’t feel any more his than the rest of him.

But it must have worked, because she kept going. “I’m held to be something of an expert on this artist. The museum felt that it would be very prestigious to have its name linked to this particular formal collection, because most of the art in it belongs to the royal family of the country in question.”

She paused again, and he couldn’t tell if she was waiting for him to say something, or if she was merely collecting her thoughts. Then she bit her lower lip, and he had a sudden flash of a near memory. He was certain—as certain as he could be—that in a more intimate setting, he had nibbled on that lower lip himself.