"The gaps," she said. "There are still gaps. Specific people — there are people in the palace that I know I love and I haven't fully retrieved who they are. Not my mother, I have her now, fully. But others."
"They'll come," Dr. Lata said. "The first to return are always the ones attached to the most strongly encoded objects. Your mother's apartment — the rosemary, the coffee cups — those were very strongly encoded, very early memory. The newer material, the more recently built rooms, those take longer."
"The person in the Coorg photograph," she said. "The hand reaching toward the lens. I know that photograph but I don't yet know whose photograph I thought I was in."
Dr. Lata smiled very slightly. "That one will come back," she said. "You'll know it when it does."
"I have a feeling it matters," she said.
"Most of the things in your palace matter," Dr. Lata said. "You built it very deliberately. You didn't put anything in it that didn't belong there." She paused. "Rohini. You woke up in your own apartment and did not know who you were. You spent five days recovering yourself from the objects you had placed around yourself for exactly that purpose. And you recovered." She looked at her across the two chairs with no desk between them. "That is an extraordinary thing. It required an extraordinary amount of prior self-knowledge and prior preparation. Both of those things came from you. From the work you did here and in the apartment. From the decision to build the palace instead of letting what was happening to you succeed in dismantling it."
She looked at the rubber plant in the corner. She thought about the plant in the palace — what it held. She did not yet know what it held. She would find out.
"I'm going to reorganise the bookshelves today," she said. "After this."
"What are you organising for?" Dr. Lata said.
She thought about it. What she needed to understand next. The territory ahead — the legal process, the therapy, the recovery of the remaining gaps, the rebuilding of the rooms that Layla had tried to demolish. The work of coming back to herself after someone had spent three years trying to take her from herself and had come closer than she wanted to think about, and had ultimately not succeeded.
"What comes next," she said. "I'm organising for what comes next."
Dr. Lata nodded. The nod of someone who had heard the right answer. "Then that's where we start," she said. "Next Thursday. Same time."
"Same time," she agreed.
