The email arrived at 7:12 a.m. on a Wednesday, tucked between a departmental reminder about parking validations and a newsletter from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine that Maren always intended to read and never did.
The subject line was blank. The sender address was a string of numbers at a free email service the digital equivalent of a note slipped under a door by someone wearing gloves. Maren almost deleted it. She deleted most unsolicited messages with the same brisk efficiency she applied to clearing her inbox on Sunday evenings, an act of hygiene she found as satisfying as wiping down a lab bench.
But something about the emptiness of the subject line its refusal to perform, to announce itself made her click.
The body of the email was three sentences:
I remember a funeral I never attended. A man in a grey suit in the rain. The drug gave me someone else's grief.
She read it twice. Then a third time, slower, the way she read anomalous data with the part of her brain that was trained to ask not what does this mean but what mechanism could produce this.
A trial participant. It had to be. Someone on Somniplex-R who was experiencing hypnagogic hallucinations or false memory formation both documented, if uncommon, side effects of drugs that modulated sleep architecture. She'd flagged the possibility in her original risk assessment, buried in Appendix C under Theoretical Adverse Effects, Low Probability. It happened. People on sleep medications sometimes woke up with memories of dreams so vivid they took on the texture of experience. It was disorienting but not dangerous. It was manageable.
She forwarded the email to herself at her personal address a habit from grad school, when university servers had a way of eating important things and then flagged it in the trial's incident-report system with a priority code of two out of five: review at next scheduled assessment.
She did not, at that moment, think about the funeral in her own dream. She had not remembered it. The dream had evaporated the way dreams do, leaving behind only a vague residue of something heavy that she attributed to the butternut squash.
• •
She mentioned it to Lena at lunch.
They ate in Lena's office on the seventh floor always Lena's office, never the cafeteria, because Lena said the cafeteria's fluorescent lighting gave her migraines, though Maren suspected the real reason was that Lena preferred environments she controlled. The office was large, corner-facing, decorated with a precise carelessness that suggested someone had paid a great deal of money to make it look unconsidered: a mid-century desk in walnut, a fiddle-leaf fig that thrived despite the filtered air, bookshelves stocked with volumes Lena may or may not have read but that projected the right frequency of intellectual seriousness.
Lena Voss was forty-four and had the particular magnetism of women who had decided, early and irrevocably, that charm was a technology. She was Sollen's Vice President of Clinical Operations a title that sounded administrative and was, in practice, closer to air traffic control. Every clinical trial the company ran passed through her office. Every data set, every regulatory submission, every communication to the FDA. She was sharp in the way a scalpel is sharp precisely, specifically, and only when she chose to be.
She'd recruited Maren personally, two years ago. Had flown to Zürich, sat across from her in a café on the Limmatquai, and said: "I've read your hippocampal consolidation work. It's the most elegant thing anyone's done in sleep science in a decade, and you're wasting it in a university that funds you like an afterthought." Maren, who had just been denied tenure for the second time and was eating dinner out of the lab microwave three nights a week, had listened. Lena had offered her the Somniplex project lead researcher, full autonomy, a budget that made her Swiss colleagues look like they were running a bake sale.
Maren had taken the job. She told herself it was about the science. It was mostly about the science.
"Someone in the trial sent me a poem this morning," Maren said, unwrapping a sandwich she'd bought from the café on the ground floor. Turkey, no mayo. She always ordered the same thing. Variation in food struck her as an unnecessary expenditure of decision-making energy.
Lena looked up from her laptop. She wore reading glasses that she removed whenever someone entered the room, a vanity so small and human it made Maren like her. "A poem?"
"Not literally. An email. Anonymous. Said they're remembering things that didn't happen. A funeral, specifically." She took a bite. Chewed. "Classic false-memory presentation. The drug's opening the REM window wider than baseline, and some subjects are getting bleed-through from dream content into waking recall."
"Are you concerned?"
"No. It's in Appendix C. I just need to flag it and monitor."
Lena closed her laptop and leaned back. She had a way of giving attention that felt like standing in a warm beam of light focused, enveloping, almost physical. "You know what I love about you, Maren? You built a drug that fixes insomnia, and your response is to worry about the one person who's dreaming too well."
"That's not what's happening."
"I know. I'm teasing." Lena smiled. "Sleep studies attract the poetic ones. Remember that woman in Phase II who kept a dream journal and tried to sell it to a publisher?"
Maren did remember. She smiled despite herself.
"Log it, monitor it, don't let it colonize your thinking," Lena said. "You've got the FDA advisory meeting in six weeks. The last thing you need is to walk in there with doubt on your face." She paused. "How's Alma?"
The shift was so smooth from clinical to personal that Maren registered it the way she registered a lane change on the highway: perceptible only because she was paying attention, and possibly not intentional. "She's good. She drew me a whale."
"She's seven now?"
"Since March."
"God. Time." Lena shook her head with an expression that was either maternal warmth or a very good approximation. "You're doing an incredible thing here, Maren. For the science and for Alma. A mother who changes the world what better story is there?"
Maren finished her sandwich and decided this was true, and that the warmth she felt was earned, and that the slight chemical note beneath Lena's bergamot perfume something metallic, like a coin held too long in a warm hand was just the recycled air.
• •
That evening, Maren took the Red Line home and stood in the kitchen boiling water for pasta and listening to a voicemail from David about a scheduling conflict next weekend. She was about to call him back when her phone buzzed with a notification from the trial's participant-management system.
It was a note from the evening monitoring team. One of the Phase III subjects a man named Frank DeLuca, Subject 042, a forty-six-year-old electrician from Revere who had entered the trial because he hadn't slept more than three hours a night since his mother died had called the check-in line to report an unusual experience.
He remembered a funeral.
Maren set down the phone and turned off the stove.
She pulled up Frank DeLuca's file on her laptop. He'd been in the trial for five months. His compliance was perfect every dose taken on schedule, every overnight session attended. His sleep metrics had improved dramatically: total sleep time up from 3.2 hours to 7.4 hours, REM latency normalized, sleep efficiency at 91 percent. He'd told the check-in nurse, during his last routine call, that he felt like "a different person." This was the word the good subjects used: different. Not better. Different.
Now he was calling to say he remembered a funeral.
Not his mother's funeral he was clear about that. A different funeral. A man he didn't recognize, in a grey suit, being buried in the rain. A church he'd never been to. Mourners he'd never met. And a feeling a weight in his chest, a specific, located grief that didn't belong to him.
Maren read the note twice. Then she pulled up the anonymous email from that morning and placed the two reports side by side on her screen.
A man in a grey suit. In the rain.
Two subjects, in different dosage groups, at different sites, with no connection to each other, reporting the same impossible memory.
She sat with this for ninety seconds. She counted them. During those ninety seconds, several parts of her brain competed for jurisdiction. The scientist said: coincidence, pareidolia, the brain's pattern-matching going off-leash. Funeral imagery is universal. Grey suits are universal. Rain is rain. The clinician said: flag it, escalate the monitoring, pull both subjects for additional cognitive assessment. And somewhere deeper, in a region of her mind she didn't trust because it couldn't be quantified, something else said: this is wrong.
She opened the incident-report form. Typed a summary. Paused at the field labeled Severity Assessment.
Her cursor blinked.
She selected Low Monitor and Report at Next Review.
She closed the form. Closed the laptop. Boiled new water. Made pasta she would eat standing at the counter, as she always did, in the apartment that clanked and settled around her like a body shifting in sleep.
She did not call David back. She did not look at the reports again. She went to bed at ten-thirty and lay in the dark and thought about two strangers remembering the same dead man in the same grey suit in the same impossible rain, and she told herself that this was the kind of thing that happened in trials, that the human brain was a pattern machine and sometimes the patterns were ghosts, and that the correct response was clinical vigilance, not dread.
She told herself this until she fell asleep.
She did not dream of the funeral. Not this time.
But the man in the grey suit was there, somewhere, folded into the data she hadn't looked at closely enough, waiting with the patience of all buried things.