Three months later, winter broke.
Not dramatically not with the photogenic thaw of movies, where ice cracks and rivers run and birds appear as though hired by a production designer. Boston's winter broke the way Boston's winter always breaks: grudgingly, incrementally, in small, irritated concessions. A day above forty. Two days above forty. A week where the sidewalks weren't lethal. The trees didn't bud so much as shrug.
Maren noticed because she was paying attention. She was paying attention to everything now the weather, the light, the way the air tasted in the morning, the temperature of her coffee, the color of the sky above Somerville at 6:47 a.m. She paid attention with the deliberate, systematic awareness of a woman who had learned that some things can be taken from you while you sleep and had decided, as a countermeasure, to be present for as much of her life as possible.
She'd left Sollen. The company was in receivership the board had dissolved, the Somniplex trial had been permanently terminated, and the building in the Seaport District had been quietly leased to a biotech startup that manufactured artificial cartilage, which was a transition that felt, to Maren, like the world's driest metaphor.
She'd taken a teaching position at a small college in Western Massachusetts Alder College, a liberal arts institution tucked into hills of maple and birch, where the buildings were old brick and the parking lots smelled of pine mulch and the students were earnest enough to remind her of Tomás, who had sent her a text after the story broke that read: Dr. Shaw, I had no idea. I'm sorry. You were brilliant and I should have told you more often.
She taught two courses: Introduction to Neuroscience and a seminar called Sleep and Memory, which had a waiting list of forty-seven students, most of whom had read the Globe article and wanted to ask her about it and all of whom she redirected, firmly and cheerfully, to the published research instead.
She was, by most external measures, fine. She had a job. She had a small apartment in the village a second-floor walkup above a used bookstore, with wide pine floors and a kitchen window that overlooked a garden where someone had planted crocuses that emerged in March like purple secrets. She had Alma every other weekend and every Wednesday night, the custody arrangement unchanged because David, to his credit, had not used the situation against her had, in fact, called her the day the story broke and said, with the simple decency of a structural engineer who understood that some loads are too heavy for one person: "What do you need?"
She needed time. She got time.
The federal investigation proceeded with the slow, grinding thoroughness of a system that was designed to be thorough and not fast. Catherine Hale had assembled a team. Subpoenas had been issued. Sollen's servers had been seized. The Phase 0 database had been entered into evidence with a chain-of-custody documentation that would take Maren's encrypted USB drive and its 847 memory files and transform them, through the patient alchemy of the legal system, into something a jury could understand.
Lena Voss had been charged with fourteen counts of conducting unauthorized human experimentation and one count of conspiracy to defraud the FDA. She was out on bail. She had not contacted Maren. Maren did not expect her to.
Sometimes, in the evenings, after classes, Maren sat at the kitchen window and looked at the garden and thought about Lena. Not with anger the anger had passed through her like a weather system, intense and total and temporary. What remained was something quieter: a curiosity about the exact moment Lena had decided that the technology was worth more than the people it was tested on. Whether that moment had been sharp and specific a midnight decision, a line crossed with full awareness or whether it had been gradual, a slow erosion of the boundary between ambition and violation, the kind of erosion that happens so slowly you can't point to the day the riverbank collapsed.
She didn't know. She suspected Lena didn't know either.
• •
Maren had started a journal.
Not a scientific log not the structured, indexed, citation-heavy documentation system she'd used her entire career. A personal journal. A notebook, spiral-bound, with lined pages and a blue cover and a pen clipped to the spiral, the kind of object you buy at a drugstore for $2.99 and fill with the things that don't fit anywhere else.
She wrote in it every evening. Not every detail she wasn't constructing a record. She was writing down memories as they came, without trying to verify them.
Today I taught the hippocampal lecture and a student asked about false memory and I didn't flinch.
Alma called to tell me she lost a tooth. She put it under her pillow. She wants the tooth fairy to bring her a magnifying glass, not money, because she wants to "investigate things."
I remembered the smell of Avó Beatriz's kitchen garlic and olive oil and the radio playing fado music. I think this is real. I don't know. I'm writing it down anyway.
Some entries were true. She could verify them the student, the tooth, the phone call. Some entries were memories she couldn't verify and had decided to keep anyway, holding them lightly, the way you hold a photograph that might be of someone else's family but that moves you regardless.
She was learning to live with uncertainty. Not comfortably comfort was not the goal. The goal was function. The goal was the ability to move through her days without performing a forensic audit of every internal experience. The goal was to be a person who remembered things and wasn't sure about all of them and kept going.
It was, she thought, not so different from what everyone did. Everyone's memories were imperfect. Everyone's past was a story they told themselves, revised and edited and simplified over time. The difference was that Maren knew some of her edits had been made by someone else and that knowledge, while terrible, was also, in a way she hadn't expected, freeing. If you knew the ground was uncertain, you stopped looking for bedrock. You learned to walk on shifting terrain. You developed a different kind of balance.
• •
On a Saturday morning in late March three months and one week after the night in the sub-basement Maren and Alma took the commuter rail into Boston.
Alma had requested the trip. She wanted to see the harbor. She wanted to walk along the waterfront and look at the boats and eat a soft pretzel from the cart near the aquarium not go inside the aquarium, just eat a pretzel near it, because the pretzels, in Alma's taxonomy, were in a higher category than the fish.
They walked along the harborwalk. The air was cold but softening late March in Boston, the first suggestion of April in the wind, the harbor smelling of salt and mud and the decaying ice of a winter that was losing its argument with spring.
Alma wore the yellow rain boots. She'd outgrown the old ones the ones with the penguins so these were new: yellow, plain, slightly too big, purchased by David at a Target in Cambridge with the pragmatic efficiency of a father who understood that a child's feet grew faster than a father's ability to keep track. Alma walked with the confident, slightly pigeon-toed stride of a seven-year-old who believed sidewalks were invented specifically for her use, and Maren walked beside her and listened to the click-and-drag of rubber on concrete and felt the cold harbor wind on her face.
They stopped at the railing near Long Wharf. The water was grey-green, choppy, flecked with light. A ferry was pulling into the dock, its engine rumbling, its wake spreading across the harbor in lines that widened and thinned and eventually disappeared.
Alma leaned against the railing and looked at the water with the focused intensity of a child who is about to say something she considers important.
"Mom, remember when we saw the seal?"
Maren felt the words land in her chest. A small impact precise, located, the specific ache of a question that contained, within its six words, the entire architecture of the novel she had been living for the past four months.
Remember when we saw the seal?
She didn't know. She might have seen a seal, here, at this harbor, on some other Saturday. Alma might have seen a seal with David. Alma might have invented the seal children did that, they constructed memories from desires, they remembered things they wanted to have happened because the wanting and the happening were, at seven, not yet fully distinct.
Or the seal might be real. They might have stood here, at this railing, on a day Maren couldn't verify, and watched a harbor seal surface and turn and look at them with its round, dark, curious eyes, and Alma might have pointed and shouted and Maren might have held her up to see, and it might have been a moment of such ordinary, unremarkable joy that Maren hadn't thought to photograph it or record it or file it in any system.
It might be real.
She looked at her daughter's face Alma's face, lit by the cold spring light, the harbor reflected in her eyes, the slight gap where the lost tooth had been and she thought about all the things she couldn't prove and all the things she'd lost and all the things that had been taken from her while she slept and the things she'd chosen to take back.
She thought about Lena's syringe and Henrik's borrowed sweater and Dolores's hand below her collarbone and Leonard alive in his armchair and a song about a little boat.
She thought about the 6 Hz signal, silent now, degrading in the brains of eight hundred people who were learning, slowly and in their own ways, to separate the memories they were given from the lives they chose.
She thought about her journal, and the entries she couldn't verify, and the decision she'd made to write them down anyway.
"I remember," she said.
She meant it.
Alma smiled the particular, devastating smile of a child who has just received confirmation that the world is as she believes it to be and turned back to the water, leaning against the railing, looking for another seal.
Maren stood beside her. The harbor spread before them grey water, white ferry, the city's skyline sharp against a sky that was, for the first time in months, more blue than grey. The wind carried salt and diesel and the faint green smell of something thawing.
She did not reach for her phone. She did not check her notebook. She did not try to verify the seal or the light or the sound of Alma's boots on the concrete or the feeling in her chest the warm, imperfect, unscientific feeling of being alive in a body that remembered things, some of them true and some of them not, all of them hers.
She would build forward, on uncertain ground, and call it home.