The missing hour

Chapter 3 The thing her body remembers

I scrubbed my palm raw in the bathroom sink that night, even after the blood had already washed away, even after I'd checked twice and found no cut, no scratch, nothing that explained where it had come from.

I told myself it was nothing. A nosebleed I don't remember. Something small and ordinary that my exhausted brain had folded into a nightmare and made monstrous.

I didn't call Caius. I wanted to, in some small traitorous corner of myself, and that was exactly why I didn't.

By morning, I had convinced myself the whole thing could be filed away. The photograph was some elaborate manipulation. The memory flash was stress. The dream was stress too, compounded, feeding on itself. I had a life. A good one, an orderly one, and I intended to go back to living it.

I almost believed myself, right up until dinner.

---

My mother insisted on Sunday dinners, the kind with place settings and candles even when it was just the three of us. Isolde sat at the head of the table like she'd been carved into the chair, spine straight, wine glass held by the stem instead of the bowl. Severin sat across from me, already halfway through recounting some deal he'd closed that week, the kind of story he told with his hands as much as his voice.

"You're quiet tonight," Isolde said, studying me over the rim of her glass. "Long week?"

"Something like that." I moved food around my plate without eating much of it. "I had a strange encounter yesterday. At the train station."

Severin's fork paused, barely, over his plate. "Strange how?"

"A man. He knew my name. Said we'd met before." I kept my voice light, testing the water rather than diving in. "He mentioned Lyon."

The room didn't change. Not visibly. The candles still flickered the same way, the clock on the far wall still ticked at the same pace. But something in Severin went still for half a second — a stillness too complete to be casual, gone so fast I might have imagined it if I hadn't been watching for exactly that.

"Lyon," he repeated, and reached for his wine. "Strange choice of city for a stranger to invent."

"He wasn't inventing it," I said. "He had a photograph."

"People can make anything look real these days." Severin's smile came back into place, easy and practiced, the same smile he used in boardrooms. "You should be careful who you talk to at train stations, Liora. Not everyone has good intentions."

"Your brother's right," Isolde said, setting down her glass with a small, deliberate click. "There are people who target women like you. It's an unfortunate reality of the family name."

They moved the conversation along smoothly after that, Severin steering us toward some charity gala Isolde was organizing, and I let them, because I didn't yet know what I was looking at. But I noticed. I noticed the half-second stillness. I noticed how quickly Severin had reached for his glass, the way people do when they need something to hold onto that isn't a fork trembling in their hand.

I had never once, in my whole life, wondered whether my family was hiding something from me.

I wondered now.

---

Caius called that night. Not a text this time — a call, my phone lighting up with a number I didn't recognize but somehow already knew.

"Don't ask your family about Lyon," he said, before I'd even finished saying hello.

"Good evening to you too."

"I'm serious, Liora."

"So was I, at dinner." I sat down slowly on the edge of my bed, my phone pressed to my ear. "Which, by the way, went about as well as you'd expect. My brother nearly choked on his wine."

Silence on the other end. Not surprised silence. Careful silence.

"What do you know about my family?" I asked.

"Not enough," he said. "Which is exactly why I need you to stop asking them questions until I do."

"You don't get to tell me what to do."

"I'm not telling you what to do." His voice was low, steady, but there was something underneath it now, something that hadn't been there before — worry, maybe, or the memory of worry. "I'm asking you to be careful. There's a difference."

I pulled my knees up to my chest, phone still in my ear, and let the silence stretch before I asked what had been sitting in my chest since the platform.

"If we were what you say we were," I said quietly, "why did you let six years pass without finding me?"

"I didn't let anything happen," he said. "You made me promise."

"Promise what?"

"Never to look for you." His voice dropped, quiet enough that I had to press the phone closer to hear him. "You asked me for that. And I gave it to you, because you asked like your life depended on it."

My throat tightened. "Why would I ask you that?"

"Because you were afraid," he said. "Afraid of what would happen if I found you."

"Found me how? I wasn't lost."

"Weren't you?"

I didn't have an answer for that. I sat there in the dark, phone pressed to my ear, feeling the shape of a question I didn't know how to ask.

"You said you spent six years looking for me," I said instead. "If I made you promise not to."

"I did."

"Why would you break a promise like that?"

There was a pause before he answered, long enough that I could hear him breathing on the other end, steady and controlled, like a man holding something back with effort.

"Because you were the only person I couldn't convince myself to forget," he said.

I closed my eyes. The words settled somewhere low in my chest, warm and unbearable at once, and for a moment I forgot to be afraid of any of it — the photograph, the dream, my brother's half-second of stillness at the dinner table. There was just his voice, quiet and certain, and the strange ache of being known by someone I couldn't remember at all.

"Caius—"

"I have to go," he said, gently, before I could finish. "Be careful, Liora. Please."

The line went dead.

I sat there for a long time after, phone still warm in my hand, replaying his voice until it started to blur with the memory of the dream — his voice, his hand in my hair, rain against glass that didn't exist anywhere I could name.

My phone buzzed again.

Another unknown number. Another photograph.

This one wasn't of me.

It was Severin, younger, standing outside a stone building I somehow recognized despite never having seen it — a small hotel front, ivy climbing one side, a courtyard visible through an iron gate.

Lyon.

Unde

rneath the photograph, in plain white text, seven words waited for me.

*You were never supposed to remember.*