The missing hour

Chapter 4 the photograph

I found Severin in his study the next morning, still in his robe, a coffee cooling untouched beside a stack of papers he wasn't reading. I didn't knock. I'd stopped believing I needed permission to walk into a room in my own family's house, at least for today.

"We need to talk," I said, and set my phone down on his desk, the photograph filling the screen.

He looked at it for a long moment. Long enough that I watched him decide how to react, the way you'd watch someone choose which door to walk through.

"That's not me," he said.

"It looks exactly like you."

"Photographs can be altered, Liora. You know that better than most, given what you've been dealing with this week."

"I didn't say where I got it."

"You didn't have to." He finally looked up at me, and his expression had smoothed itself back into something calm, controlled, almost bored. "I assume it came from the same person who's been filling your head with stories about Lyon."

I studied him, waiting for the question anyone innocent would ask first. *Where did you get this? Who sent it to you? When was it taken?* He asked none of them.

"Who else has seen it?" he asked instead.

Something cold moved through me.

"Why does that matter?" I asked. "If it's not even you."

"Because baseless rumors have a way of causing damage regardless of whether they're true." His voice stayed even, reasonable, the tone he used when he was managing a difficult client. "Our family has enemies, Liora. People who would love nothing more than a scandal to attach to our name. I'd rather deal with this quietly before it becomes something messier."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you need."

I felt something harden in my chest, some resolve I hadn't known I had until it was already standing between us. "Caius says we knew each other. That we were together. In Lyon."

"Caius Moreau is dangerous," Severin said, and for the first time his voice sharpened, just slightly, just enough. "You don't remember him because remembering would destroy you. I'm asking you, as your brother, to stay away from him."

"Destroy me how?"

"You wouldn't survive it."

"That's not an answer either." My voice rose, steadier than I expected it to be. "If there's nothing to hide, why are you so afraid of what I'll remember?"

Something shifted behind his eyes.

It was there and gone in an instant, but I saw it — a flicker of something raw beneath the composure, something I had never once seen on my brother's face in twenty-eight years. Fear. Not irritation, not the practiced concern of someone managing an inconvenience. Fear, plain and unguarded, before he folded it back beneath his usual calm.

"You don't know what you're asking," he said quietly.

"Then tell me."

"Stay away from him, Liora." He stood, buttoning his robe like he was ending a meeting rather than a conversation with his sister. "I'm not going to say it again."

I left without another word, because I understood, standing in that study, that I wasn't going to get anything else from him. Not that day. Maybe not ever, unless I find it myself.

---

I met Caius that evening in a quiet café two streets from my apartment, tucked into a corner table where the light was low, and the other patrons were too absorbed in their own conversations to notice ours.

He was already there when I arrived, two cups of coffee on the table, one clearly meant for me, though I hadn't told him what I liked. I didn't ask how he knew.

I sat down and slid my phone across the table instead, the photograph of Severin still on the screen.

Caius went still the moment he saw it. Not the careful stillness Severin had shown me — something rawer, older, like grief resurfacing on contact.

"Where did you get this?" he asked.

"Someone sent it to me. Anonymously." I watched his face carefully. "You know that place. I can see it."

"I know it." His jaw tightened. "That hotel. It's where we spent our last night together. Before everything went wrong."

My pulse climbed. "What happened there?"

"Liora—"

"Tell me."

"I can't." He said it like it cost him something. "Not because I'm protecting myself. Because I don't know what it will do to you if you hear it before you're ready."

"I'm not a child, Caius. I deserve to know what happened to my own life."

"I know you do." His voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word. "That's not the same as being safe."

I wanted to be angry with him. I tried to be. But sitting across from him in that dim little café, watching the careful control in his face fracture at the edges, I couldn't hold onto the anger the way I wanted to.

"Did you love me?" I asked, quieter than I meant to.

He looked at me for a long moment, long enough that the question seemed to hang in the air between us, taking up all the space at the table.

"I never stopped," he said.

Something in my chest gave way, quietly, without my permission.

Neither of us said anything for a while. The café noise moved around us, distant and unimportant, while I sat there trying to understand how a stranger's voice could undo me so completely.

Finally, Caius reached into his coat and took out his phone.

"I wasn't going to show you this," he said. "Not yet. But I think you need to see it more than I need to protect you from it."

"Show me what?"

He turned the screen toward me and pressed play.

The video was shaky, handheld, clearly filmed in a dim room. And there I was — younger, my hair longer than I wear it now, my face streaked with tears. Caius held me in the frame, one arm wrapped around my shoulders, his voice low and broken as he said something I couldn't quite make out beneath my own crying.

Then my past self lifted her head, looked directly into the camera, and whispered words that reached through the screen and settled somewhere.

Deep in my chest.

"If I ever come back," she said, "don't let me remember."

The screen went black.