CHAPTER2:SOMEWHERE ACROSS THE CITY.
980 Words
---
Somewhere across the city Dylan McCaffrey stood before the blackened remains of his childhood home.
He'd been here fourteen times since the fire.
He knew that because he counted.
Counting was the only honest thing left — the only thing that didn't lie to him the way everything else had. The investigators who'd called it accidental. The officials who'd buried the report. The people who'd looked him in the eye at the funeral and said *these things happen* with the particular ease of people who knew exactly why this particular thing had happened and weren't going to say so.
He counted instead.
Fourteen visits.
Fourteen times standing on this pavement looking at what was left.
Which was nothing.
Which was the point.
---
The night air moved around him — cold, indifferent, the city going about its business fourteen floors below his grief and not caring at all.
He didn't feel the cold.
He'd stopped feeling it somewhere around visit four or five. Stopped feeling a lot of things around that time. It wasn't numbness exactly — numbness was passive, something that happened to you. What Dylan had developed was more deliberate than that.
Control.
The specific, practiced, daily discipline of a man who had decided that feeling things fully was a luxury he couldn't afford until he had answers.
He would feel everything.
When he had answers.
His phone buzzed.
Marcus.
*She's awake. Doctors say she remembers nothing. Everything — gone.*
Dylan read it once.
Didn't respond.
Looked back at the ruins.
*She remembers nothing.*
He thought about that.
Turned it over the way he turned everything over — methodically, from all angles, looking for the place where it stopped being true.
People forgot things.
Details. Faces. The specific texture of ordinary days.
But not everything.
Not like this.
Not so completely that you woke up in a hospital bed and couldn't tell a nurse your own name.
That kind of forgetting didn't happen.
It was made to happen.
---
He'd found her name eight months ago.
Buried three layers deep in a financial record that shouldn't have existed — a payment, routed through two shell companies and a defunct logistics firm, made four days before the fire. He'd almost missed it. Would have missed it if Marcus hadn't flagged the account number — the same account that had appeared in six other transactions Dylan had been tracking for two years.
*Cameron Voss.*
No history. No address. No paper trail beyond a handful of cash-in-hand employment records and a name on a hospital intake form.
A ghost.
Or someone who had been made into one.
He'd spent eight months trying to find her.
And now she was in a hospital bed across this city remembering nothing.
*How convenient,* something cold and certain said inside him.
*How very convenient.*
---
He looked at the place where the front door had been.
The threshold.
The last place his parents had stood.
He thought about his father — the quiet man who had built something real and protected it carefully and trusted the wrong people and paid for that trust with everything. He thought about his mother — who had laughed too easily and loved too openly and died in a burning house screaming a name Dylan still didn't fully understand.
*Cameron.*
She'd been screaming *Cameron.*
He thought about that constantly.
About what it meant that his mother — in the last minutes of her life, in a burning house, with everything collapsing around her — had been screaming the name of a girl who was now lying in a hospital bed with no memory of any of it.
It meant something.
Everything meant something if you looked long enough.
Dylan had been looking for years.
---
His phone buzzed again.
Marcus: *Do you want me to arrange access?*
Dylan looked at the message.
Looked at the ruins.
Looked at the message again.
He thought about Cameron Voss in a hospital bed — bandaged, alone, no name that felt like her own and no past to explain why. He thought about what she looked like in the single photograph Marcus had found — a blurred image from a security camera, grainy and indistinct, a young woman with dark hair and eyes that were looking at something just outside the frame with the focused attention of someone who noticed things.
He thought about the fact that she was the only person who had been inside that house and survived.
People didn't survive fires like that by accident.
They survived because someone wanted them to.
Or because someone hadn't finished what they started.
*Do you want me to arrange access?*
He typed back one word.
*Yes.*
He put his phone away.
Stood for one more moment looking at the ruins of the place that had made him — the house where he'd grown up, where his parents had laughed and argued and built something worth protecting, where everything had ended on a night that still didn't make sense no matter how many times he turned it over.
Then he walked back to his car.
Got in.
Sat in the dark for a moment.
*She remembers nothing,* Marcus had said.
Dylan started the engine.
*That won't last.*
And when it didn't —
He would be there.
He was always going to be there.
From the moment her name had appeared in that file —
From the moment he'd understood what it meant —
This had already been inevitable.
The only question was what he would find when he got there.
A guilty woman.
Or something else entirely.
He pulled away from the kerb.
Drove toward the answer.
*But the question that sat in the dark car with him — the one he hadn't been able to answer in eight months of searching —*
*Why had she survived when no one else had?*
---
- Writer
