My finger stilled against my empty hand.
I looked down at it, that unconscious searching movement, the body reaching for something the mind had been told never existed, and something cold and enormous settled inside me because bodies didn't lie the way minds could be made to lie, bodies remembered things that had been taken without permission, things buried under years of careful manufactured forgetting.
I looked up at Adrian.
He was still staring at his hands, still wearing the expression of a man standing inside a memory he couldn't fully enter, something pressing against the inside of his mind that kept dissolving every time he reached for it, and I wanted to pull every fragment out of him before it disappeared again, but the note in my pocket held me back.
Don't let Adrian remember
