The Unknown Train

CHAPTER 6 — BEFORE YOU FORGOT ME

The memories returned faster now, arriving almost faster than Mira could hold them, as if some dam inside her had finally given way.

She remembered childhood promises, whispered in the particular seriousness only children can manage.

"Promise you'll never disappear."

"I promise."

She remembered being older — sixteen, maybe seventeen — sitting beside Aiden on a bench somewhere she couldn't place, holding a small paper flower he'd folded for her out of a page torn from a school notebook.

"I couldn't find a real one," he'd said, a little embarrassed, pressing it into her palm.

"I like this one better," she'd told him, and meant it.

Then, deeper still, there had been a night when Aiden had tried to tell her something — a night that had, until now, been sealed away from her entirely, locked behind whatever mercy or cruelty had let her forget.

"Mira..." he'd said, in the memory, his voice careful in a way she hadn't understood at the time.

"Hmm?" She'd been looking at something else — the sky, maybe, or her own hands — not paying full attention.

"There's something I want to tell you."

The memory ended there, abruptly, in headlights and rain and the terrible sound she still couldn't let herself fully hear.

Then the hospital — white walls, a chair too hard to sleep in, a voice she didn't recognize telling her something she'd refused, for years, to remember hearing.

Then silence, stretching out for what felt like the rest of her life.

Grief doesn't always erase memories. Sometimes, Mira understood now, it simply hides them where we cannot reach them — not gone, only buried, waiting for someone patient enough, or loved enough, to dig them back up.

She looked at Aiden across the space between them, and the words came without her deciding to say them.

"I loved you."

"I know."

"You left me."

"I didn't want to." His voice cracked slightly on the words, the first c***k she'd heard in him since she'd met him at the platform.

"You promised," she said, and it wasn't an accusation anymore, just grief, plain and unguarded.

"I know."

"Why didn't you let me remember?" she asked. "Why did you let me forget you completely?"

"Because you couldn't live," Aiden said, "if you kept waiting for me."

"You have to stop coming here," Mira said, though the words cost her something to say. "This has to stop."

"And if I don't?"

"Then you'll keep living between yesterday and tomorrow. Not really in either one."

"I don't want to lose you again," he said, and for the first time, he sounded afraid.

"You already did," Mira said softly. "A long time ago. I just didn't know it yet."

The train doors began to close, slow and final, the sound of them sealing something shut that had been open far too long.