The call came Tuesday morning while I was reviewing the Henderson Development Group tender documents that could save our company. Marcus answered, and I watched his face shift from professional courtesy to something approaching panic.
"Dr. Mitchell wants to see you," he said, hanging up with hands that trembled slightly. "Today. She says it's routine follow-up, but Eva..." He paused, running those familiar gray eyes over my face with an expression I was learning to recognize—the look of a man trying to reconcile what he saw with what he thought he knew.
"It's required for insurance purposes," I said, keeping my voice steady while my mind raced through implications. "Standard protocol for head trauma cases."
But we both knew it wasn't standard. Not when the hospital's chief neurologist personally requested an immediate appointment. Not when her voice had carried the particular tone that medical professionals used when they'd found something interesting.
The London Neurological Institute occupied a converted Georgian mansion in Harley Street, its cream-colored façade speaking of the sort of discretion that wealthy patients paid premium rates to secure. The reception area blended modern medical efficiency with old-world elegance—exactly the sort of environment where secrets were meant to be extracted with surgical precision.
"Miss Sterling?" The receptionist's voice carried the practiced neutrality of someone accustomed to handling delicate situations. "Dr. Mitchell will see you now."
Dr. Sarah Mitchell's office was a masterclass in psychological intimidation disguised as professional competence. The walls held diplomas from Cambridge and Harvard, framed research papers, and awards that spoke of a brilliant career built on understanding the human mind's deepest complexities. Behind her desk, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked a private garden where afternoon light filtered through ancient oak trees.
She was younger than I'd expected—perhaps thirty-five—with the sort of controlled intelligence that reminded me of the bluestocking women who'd attended my father's dinner parties. Auburn hair pulled back in a professional chignon, designer glasses that probably cost more than most people earned in a month, and the unmistakable confidence of someone who'd never met a puzzle she couldn't solve.
"Miss Sterling," she said, gesturing to a leather chair positioned at precisely the right angle to catch natural light while keeping her own face partially shadowed. "Thank you for coming. I know this must seem unnecessary, but I've been reviewing your case, and there are some aspects that I find... intriguing."
The word hung in the air like a sword of Damocles. Intriguing. In medical terminology, that meant she'd found inconsistencies that couldn't be explained by standard diagnostic categories.
"Of course," I replied, settling into the chair with the sort of composed grace that my governess had drilled into me since childhood. "I'm eager to resolve any concerns."
Dr. Mitchell opened a tablet—one of those impossibly thin computers that still made me marvel at how far technology had advanced—and began scrolling through what I assumed were my medical records.
"Your initial presentation was quite dramatic," she said, her tone carefully neutral. "Thames rescue, complete amnesia, no identification. But what's fascinating is how quickly you've recovered certain types of memory while others remain completely blocked."
She looked up, and I felt the weight of professional scrutiny that could dissect a soul with surgical precision. "Most selective amnesia cases follow predictable patterns. Traumatic memories are suppressed while procedural and semantic memories remain intact. But your case..." She paused, letting the silence stretch long enough to become uncomfortable. "Your case suggests something much more sophisticated."
The first test was subtle—so subtle that someone without my particular education might have missed it entirely. She asked me to describe my earliest memory, then followed up with seemingly innocent questions about family traditions, childhood holidays, and school experiences. Each answer was carefully catalogued, cross-referenced against responses I'd given during my hospital stay.
But I'd been trained by masters of social manipulation. My father's dinner parties had been legendary not just for the quality of the food and wine, but for the political maneuvering that occurred over brandy and cigars. I'd learned to read micro-expressions before I understood what they meant, to craft responses that revealed exactly what I wanted to reveal while hiding everything else.
"Edinburgh was quite cold in winter," I said, weaving truth with fiction in the sort of tapestry that would be impossible to unravel without intimate knowledge of Scottish weather patterns. "My mother used to say that character was built in adversity, which is probably why she insisted I attend university despite my father's concerns about women in higher education."
Each detail was carefully chosen—plausible enough to withstand casual scrutiny, emotionally resonant enough to feel authentic, but vague enough to avoid verification. I drew on memories of conversations with Scottish business partners, advertisements I'd seen for Edinburgh's University, and the sort of progressive attitudes that had been emerging in my time among the more forward-thinking families.
"Tell me about your educational background," Dr. Mitchell said, making notes on her tablet with the stylus that replaced the fountain pens of my era. "What did you study?"
"Business and economics, with a particular focus on organizational psychology," I replied, drawing on knowledge that had been cutting-edge in the 1920s but would now seem like historical curiosity. "I was particularly interested in the work being done on industrial efficiency and worker motivation. Taylor's scientific management principles, Mayo's human relations movement—fascinating stuff, really."
I caught the flicker of interest in her eyes. She was too young to recognize that I was citing research from nearly a century ago, but old enough to appreciate the sophisticated understanding they represented.
"That's quite progressive for someone from a traditional Scottish family," she observed, and I heard the probing edge beneath the conversational tone.
"My father was a businessman," I said, allowing a note of pride to enter my voice—the sort of pride that came naturally when discussing family achievements. "He believed that understanding people was the key to understanding profit. He used to say that anyone could balance a ledger, but it took real intelligence to balance human nature."
It was exactly the sort of thing my father would have said, and the emotion was genuine enough to pass even sophisticated analysis. But underneath, I was mapping her responses, cataloguing the ways she reacted to different types of information.
The real test came an hour into the session, when she shifted to more direct psychological assessment.
"I'd like to try some memory exercises," she said, pulling out what looked like a series of cards. "Nothing invasive—just some simple recognition tasks that can help us understand how your cognitive processes are functioning."
The Wechsler Memory Scale. I recognized it from descriptions I'd read during my frantic research into modern psychological techniques. Visual and auditory memory tests designed to detect patterns of impairment that could indicate genuine neurological damage versus psychological trauma versus outright malingering.
She showed me a series of images—faces, objects, geometric patterns—then asked me to identify them from a larger set after various time intervals. It was designed to catch people who were faking memory problems by making the tasks appear more difficult than they actually were.
But I'd been educated in an era when memory training was considered an essential skill for any well-bred lady. My governess had drilled me in techniques for remembering names, faces, and social obligations that would have impressed modern cognitive scientists. The ability to recall detailed information after a single exposure wasn't superhuman—it was simply good breeding.
I performed well enough to demonstrate intact cognitive function, but not so well as to raise suspicions about the source of my abilities. When she showed me a face that reminded me of my cousin Margaret—the same sharp cheekbones and calculating eyes—I allowed a moment of genuine confusion to cross my features.
"Is something wrong?" Dr. Mitchell asked immediately, her professional instincts picking up on the emotional shift.
"That face," I said, pointing to the photograph. "She reminds me of someone, but I can't quite..." I let my voice trail off, allowing the frustration of incomplete memory to color my tone. "It's so annoying when something's right there on the tip of your tongue."
It was a masterful performance, if I said so myself. Genuine emotion anchored to false circumstances, creating the sort of authentic response that would satisfy even sophisticated analysis.
The psychological inventory came next—hundreds of questions designed to map personality traits, detect deception, and identify psychological disorders. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory had been refined over decades to catch even sophisticated attempts at manipulation.
But I had advantages that its designers had never anticipated. My education had included extensive reading in the psychological theories that formed the foundation of modern assessment. I understood the theoretical framework underlying the questions, which meant I could craft responses that would paint exactly the psychological portrait I wanted to create.
"I often feel like others don't understand me," I read aloud, one of the items designed to detect paranoid tendencies. The correct answer for someone maintaining a false identity would be "true," but that would trigger red flags in the deception scales.
"Sometimes," I replied, then added with the sort of rueful smile that invited confidence, "but I think that's true for most people who've been through traumatic experiences. You start to feel like you're living in a different world from everyone else."
Perfect. Honest enough to avoid the deception markers, psychologically sophisticated enough to demonstrate insight, but tinged with exactly the sort of isolation that trauma victims experienced. Each response was calculated to create a portrait of someone who'd been through genuine hardship but had maintained essential psychological stability.
The session stretched into its third hour, and I could feel Dr. Mitchell's frustration growing. Her questions became more direct, her manner more probing. She was intelligent enough to recognize that something didn't quite fit, but experienced enough to know that human psychology rarely followed textbook patterns.
"Tell me about your dreams," she said finally, leaning back in her chair with the sort of casual posture that meant we were moving into deeper psychological territory.
Dreams. The royal road to the unconscious, as Freud had called them. In my time, dream analysis had been the newest frontier in understanding human behavior. Dr. Mitchell probably expected me to describe the sort of fragmented, symbolic narratives that trauma victims typically reported.
Instead, I gave her something much more sophisticated.
"I dream about numbers," I said, allowing puzzlement to color my voice. "Endless columns of figures, profit and loss statements, investment portfolios. It's strange—I remember feeling completely comfortable with complex financial calculations, but when I try to do them now, consciously, it's like reaching for something that's no longer there."
It was brilliant because it was psychologically plausible, emotionally authentic, and completely impossible to verify. The dreams I described drew on real experiences—countless nights spent reviewing financial documents with my father—but reframed them as recovered memory rather than century-old experience.
"That's quite common in cases of selective amnesia," Dr. Mitchell said, making more notes. "Procedural memories often surface through dreams before they're accessible to conscious recall."
She was beginning to relax, I realized. The dream narrative had provided exactly the sort of psychological coherence that her analytical mind craved. It explained my business expertise, my comfort with complex financial concepts, and my occasional flashes of knowledge that seemed beyond my apparent background.
The final test was the most dangerous.
"I'd like to try some hypnotic regression," she said, producing a small device that looked like a metronome. "Nothing dramatic—just a light trance state that might help us access some of the blocked memories."
Hypnosis. In my time, it had been considered a promising therapeutic technique, though still viewed with some skepticism by the medical establishment. But I'd been present at demonstrations—my father had been interested in anything that might provide business advantages—and I understood both its possibilities and its limitations.
More importantly, I understood that the hypnotic state was far more controllable than most people realized. Someone with sufficient mental discipline could maintain conscious awareness while appearing to be in trance, could craft false memories that seemed authentic even to sophisticated analysis.
"I'm not sure about that," I said, allowing genuine nervousness to creep into my voice. "I've heard stories about people recovering memories that turned out to be false..."
"That's a legitimate concern," Dr. Mitchell replied, her manner becoming more reassuring. "But modern techniques are quite different from the sensationalized versions you might have seen in films. This would be very light, very controlled."
I hesitated for exactly the right amount of time, then nodded reluctantly. "If you think it would help."
The hypnotic induction was remarkably similar to techniques I'd observed decades earlier. Progressive relaxation, focused attention, gradual deepening of the trance state. I allowed my breathing to slow, my eyelids to flutter, while maintaining perfect awareness of everything that was happening.
"Can you hear my voice, Eva?" Dr. Mitchell asked.
"Yes," I replied, letting my voice take on the distant quality associated with hypnotic states.
"I want you to go back to the day of the accident. Can you remember being by the Thames?"
Here was the crucial moment. I needed to provide memories that were vivid enough to seem real, traumatic enough to explain my amnesia, but vague enough to avoid dangerous specifics.
"Cold," I whispered, drawing on genuine memories of that night—the shock of awakening in modern London, the disorientation, the desperate scramble to understand what had happened. "So cold. Everything spinning..."
"What do you remember from before the accident?"
"Papers," I said, letting emotion leak into my voice. "Important papers. Father's business was... was in trouble. I had to... had to save it."
The genius of this approach was that it contained enough truth to feel authentic while explaining away any inconsistencies in my story. If my business expertise seemed unusually sophisticated, it was because I'd been trained from childhood to manage family financial interests. If my knowledge of historical details seemed suspiciously precise, it was because I'd been researching family business records.
"What happened to your father's business?"
"Gone," I whispered, and the pain in my voice was completely genuine. "All gone. Everything we worked for... everything we built..."
I let myself surface from the trance slowly, with the sort of disorientation that would be expected from someone reliving traumatic memories. Dr. Mitchell was watching me with something approaching sympathy—exactly the reaction I'd been hoping to provoke.
"How do you feel?" she asked gently.
"Confused," I replied honestly. "It felt so real, but also... fragmented. Like trying to remember a dream after you've woken up."
"That's perfectly normal," she assured me, making final notes on her tablet. "Memory recovery is rarely a linear process."
The session concluded with standard post-assessment protocols—scheduling follow-up appointments that I sincerely hoped would never be necessary, providing emergency contact information that was cleverly constructed to seem helpful while being completely useless for actual verification.
"I'm going to recommend that you continue with your current activities," Dr. Mitchell said as we walked toward her office door. "Your cognitive function appears to be intact, and your psychological adjustment to the trauma seems remarkably healthy."
"Thank you," I said, offering the sort of grateful smile that patients were expected to provide. "I was worried that there might be something seriously wrong."
"Nothing that time and proper support won't heal," she replied, then paused. "You're quite fortunate to have someone like Mr. Ashworth looking after you. Family support is crucial in cases like this."
Family support. If only she knew how literally true that was.
As I left the Institute and walked back toward the car where Marcus waited, I felt the familiar thrill of a well-executed performance. Dr. Sarah Mitchell was brilliant, thorough, and completely convinced that she'd just examined a trauma victim with selective amnesia rather than a woman displaced by over a century.
But as I reached for the car door handle, I caught my reflection in the window and felt a chill that had nothing to do with London's autumn weather. Because for just a moment, watching myself manipulate one of the finest psychological minds in England, I wondered if the woman I was becoming was someone that the woman I had been would have recognized.
The thought followed me into the car, where Marcus waited with barely concealed anxiety.
"How did it go?" he asked before I'd even settled into the passenger seat.
"Clean bill of health," I replied, fastening my seatbelt with hands that were perfectly steady. "Dr. Mitchell found no evidence of ongoing psychological trauma or cognitive impairment."
The relief on his face was palpable, but I caught something else there too—a flicker of something that might have been disappointment. As if part of him had been hoping for an explanation that would make sense of the growing collection of inconsistencies he'd observed.
"That's wonderful news," he said, but his voice lacked the enthusiasm his words suggested.
As we drove back toward the office, I found myself wondering how many more such performances I could manage before the weight of constant deception became unbearable. How many more times I could look into the eyes of people who trusted me while wearing a mask that grew heavier with each passing day.
But then I thought of the Ashworth name, reduced to a failing construction company housed in a building that wouldn't have been fit for our servants' quarters. I thought of my father's dream of a commercial empire that would endure for generations, now hanging by the thread of a thirty-day reprieve from a man who carried century-old grudges like family heirlooms.
The weight of deception was nothing compared to the weight of legacy. And if saving the Ashworth name meant becoming someone that Evangeline Ashworth might not have recognized, then that was simply another price that would have to be paid.
After all, empires weren't built by people who prioritized personal comfort over historical necessity.
End of Chapter 5