Adrian had learned that memories didn't come back like photographs.
They came back like weather.
A pressure behind the eyes. A taste. A weight in the chest right before rain.
He lay on the narrow bed of the clinic room and watched the ceiling light hum. He tried to name the things that were true.
His name was Adrian.
He was thirty-two.
There had been an accident.
Everything after that was fog sealed in glass.
Everything before that was fog that moved.
But the woman in the therapy room wasn't fog.
Clara.
The name fit in his mouth with the familiarity of a habit he couldn't trace. It landed soft and inevitable, like a key finding a lock you didn't know you carried.
He closed his eyes. The room was too white; the white made sound. If he held very still, the sound separated into layers: the air vent's thin hiss, the corridor's distant trolley squeak, a nurse whispering something he couldn't make out. And beneath all of it, a memory that wasn't a memory, just the shape of one.
Rain.
Wet hair against his wrist.
A voice saying don't look at me and meaning the opposite.
He opened his eyes and sat up.
"Everything okay?" the nurse at the door asked. Her badge read Irene.
"I need a pen," he said.
She hesitated, then handed him a short blue one, the kind attached to clipboards by a string. "Only for notes. No drawing on the walls."
He almost smiled. "I'll try."
He pulled the notepad closer. The pages were micro-lined; someone before him had pressed too hard and left ghosts of numbers. He wrote Clara Voss once, slowly. The letters looked obedient and neat, like they weren't his.
He wrote it again, faster.
The second version tilted right, like it had somewhere to be.
He stared at the two names until the nurse cleared her throat. He turned the page and wrote without looking:
Blue umbrella. Corridor light. Don't say it out loud.
Don't say what?
He tapped the pen against the pad and felt a pulse of irritation, the kind that belonged to a person who hated being late. Late to what? The question slid away as soon as he reached for it.
"Mr. M.?" another voice said from the doorway. A man in a grey suit, no tie, carried a folder tucked under his arm. "I'm Dr. Rinaldi. Mind if we do a quick assessment?"
Adrian put the pen down. "Do I have a choice?"
Dr. Rinaldi smiled like he'd practiced it. "You have preferences." He set the folder on the rolling table. "Can you tell me the date?"
Adrian glanced at the wall calendar. Tuesday. The month meant nothing. The day did. A flick of static ran along his skin.
"Tuesday," he said. "It was Tuesday."
"What was?"
Adrian almost told him: the sound of a door, the glass in the frame humming, a woman's breath catching because someone had said her name the way you say a secret. He didn't say any of it.
"The first session," he said instead.
Rinaldi made a note. "How do you feel about Ms. Voss?"
"Professional," Adrian said.
The doctor looked up through the lashes of his tired eyes. "You told her you've seen her before."
"Yes."
"Had you?"
Adrian let the silence grow long enough to see what the doctor did with it. Rinaldi waited, pen poised, patient. Not hunting… collecting.
"I don't know," Adrian said.
Rinaldi nodded, as if that had been the answer he wanted. "We'll continue tomorrow."
When he left, the room swallowed its own noises again. Adrian set the pen against the paper and drew a rectangle without deciding to. Not a door. Not exactly. Longer than a door, narrower, with a line across the top where a fluorescent tube would sit and buzz. He shaded the corners until the tube looked like it was breathing.
He wrote don't turn it on and didn't understand why his hand shook.
He dreamed, when he finally slept, but the dream wasn't like sleep. It was like standing in a hallway where the lights knew your name. He could hear shoes on tile, somewhere behind him. He turned and the sound turned with him. He walked forward and the light above him flickered on by itself, then off, then on again, like a heartbeat too eager to hide.
At the end of the corridor, a door was open by the soft width of a hand. Rain talked against a window. Someone inside was crying with the care of someone who didn't want to make noise and couldn't help it.
"Clara?" he said in the dream, except he didn't say it. He swallowed it and felt it anyway.
He woke with the taste of metal in his mouth and the word again on his tongue. The light on the ceiling hummed like it had been listening.
He got up and washed his face in the tiny sink. The mirror returned a face he recognized like you recognize a stranger you've sat next to on a train in another life. A thin cut near his hairline had already decided to heal. His eyes were the color that made other people accuse you of being distant.
He dried his hands, went back to the bed, and found the notepad where he'd left it. He wrote:
You knew her hair was longer. You didn't guess. You remembered.
He underlined remembered until the paper almost tore.
They let him take a walk at noon. He didn't ask where to go; he let his feet volunteer. The clinic corridors were the same kind of clean that erases itself. He counted door numbers without meaning to and stopped in front of one that didn't match the pattern. The plaque read Consultation 3B.
He didn't remember numbers, but this one knew him.
The door was closed. Behind it, a chair might have been too far from a desk. Behind it, a therapist might have been practicing not to be nervous. He stood there until the nurse at the station looked up.
"Mr. M.?" Irene called. "You're not supposed to…"
"I was looking for the bathroom," he said, and was surprised by how believable he sounded.
"It's the other way," she said, pointing, and relaxed. People loved being useful. He thanked her and went the wrong way anyway.
By the time he found the bathroom, he didn't need it. He rinsed his hands again just to justify having come here and watched the water run off his wrists. For a half-second, he was sure there had been a bracelet there once, something plain and tired, not his. He turned his hands over. Nothing.
He went back to his room and sat. The world had the quiet of scenes right before something small and unforgivable happened. He waited without deciding to, like waiting was his job. When the knock came, it was soft.
"Mr. M.?" Irene again, gentler now. "You have a follow-up with Ms. Voss in ten minutes."
He looked up, and something in him set like concrete.
"Yes," he said.
They put him in the same chair as before. The room had been tidied so the tidy would show; the pen on the desk lay diagonally like a decision. He could hear someone on the other side of the door breathe once, steady themselves, and become a person who belonged in rooms like this.
Clara walked in.
For a moment, the air did that thing it did in storms. She didn't meet his eyes right away; she adjusted a folder; she put her hair behind her ear and immediately regretted admitting she had hair. The tiny, human choreography of someone rehearsing calm.
"Good afternoon, Adrian," she said, and her voice did something to the room the light couldn't.
He could have said good afternoon. He could have said I'm fine. He could have said I don't remember anything new and watched what that lie did to her face. He didn't say any of those.
He said, "You don't like elevators."
She went still.
It wasn't dramatic. It was the kind of still that happens when a thought puts both hands on your shoulders. Her eyes lifted, precise, the way his had when he said no to the past.
"What makes you say that?" she asked, too even.
Adrian looked at the wall as if the answer might be written there in a color only he could see. The answer came like weather again, not like a photograph.
"Because you count the stairs," he said.
He didn't know how he knew. He knew anyway.
Clara didn't move. Somewhere down the hall, a door slammed, polite. The ceiling light hummed like a warning that had learned manners.
She didn't write anything. She didn't smile. She didn't speak.
And for the first time since the accident, or since before it, Adrian felt it clearly: the sensation of being on the wrong side of the glass, watching the person who was supposed to help him realize he might be the one holding the key.
"Tell me," she said finally, voice low. "How many?"
Chapter 2
Adrian blinked slowly, and the number arrived, simple as a yes.
"Seventy-two," he said.
Clara's pen was already in her hand before she remembered she hadn't picked it up.