The Unknown Train

CHAPTER 3 — THE PHOTOGRAPH

The memory took the shape of a playground — sunlight instead of rain, laughter instead of silence, a version of the world Mira hadn't let herself remember in years.

She was younger in it. Ten, maybe eleven. And Aiden was beside her, exactly as she somehow already knew he would be, cross-legged in the grass with a disposable camera held between them.

In the memory, someone — a mother, maybe, or an aunt, someone whose face she couldn't quite bring into focus — pressed the shutter, and the photograph that resulted, the one Mira now realized she'd been keeping in a drawer for years without understanding why, showed two children with their arms slung over each other's shoulders, squinting into the sun.

On the old photograph, someone had written two initials in careful pencil.

M + A.

And beneath them, in smaller letters:

3:17.

"What does this mean?" Mira asked, holding the photograph up between them as the memory folded itself back into the train, into the rain, into now.

"You really don't remember," Aiden said. It wasn't quite a question.

"That was you. In the photo."

"Yes."

"You knew my family."

"Yes."

She swallowed. "You were there that night?"

"Yes."

"Then why don't I remember you?"

Aiden looked at her for a long moment before he answered, and when he did, his voice had gone very soft. "Because remembering me means remembering everything."

The memory broke apart before she could ask what he meant — shattered like glass, each piece showing her something different and worse than the last.

There was rain, sudden and violent.

Headlights, too bright, too close.

A terrible sound that her mind refused to shape into words.

Then darkness, total and complete.

"What happened?" Mira gasped, gripping the edge of her seat as if the train itself might tip.

"You survived," Aiden said.

"And you?"

He said nothing. His silence filled the space where an answer should have been, and it frightened her more than anything he might have said.

"Why won't you answer me?" she asked, her voice cracking.

"Because you're not ready for the answer."