And then: the thing the mind did when it received something too enormous for the evening's resources. The thing the memory science books had described — the hippocampus under cortisol, the encoding failure, the fragmentation, the specific protection of a mind that blanked the sequence to survive it. The palace going dark, room by room, the objects in it still in their places but the person walking through it no longer able to see them.
She had sat down on the floor of the living room. She had sat down and she had waited for whatever came next and whatever had come next was: morning, and not knowing who she was, and a notebook that said start at the beginning.
She stood in the bedroom and she held all of this and she was very steady. Not because it was easy — it was not easy, it was the weight of something that would take a very long time to fully carry — but because she had built herself a place to stand, in the objects of a life organised with great care, and she was standing in it.
"Inspector," she called.
Nair came to the bedroom door immediately.
"I remember," she said. "I remember what happened. I need to tell you everything."
