She went room by room in order.
This was the instruction in the blue notebooks — not the order she wanted, not the order of urgency, but the established order of the palace, which was the order in which the memories were stored and in which they were meant to be retrieved. Start at the entry. Walk through in sequence. Trust the system. The system was built for exactly this.
The entry hall first. The hook with the red scarf. She touched the scarf now — held it, the weight of it, red silk, the border embroidery. The memory it gave her was not the night of, not what she was looking for. It was older — a restaurant, a dinner, something early, something before she understood what she was inside. She put it down and moved on. Entry hall entry in the blue notebook: Scarf — before understanding. Necessary to include because the beginning is not the trouble. The beginning is always — the beginning feels like something good.
She moved into the living room. She stood before the bookshelf and she touched the spines in the order they were arranged — not reading the titles but using the books as the objects they were in the palace, each one a specific location. Third shelf, middle section. The memory science books. She opened one and it fell open to a page she had marked with a folded corner, her own fold, her own mark. The page was about the fragility of autobiographical memory under stress — how trauma interrupted the consolidation process, how the hippocampus under cortisol stopped encoding sequence and stored only fragments, how a person could live through something and retain only pieces of it, the pieces that the mind considered essential to immediate survival and nothing else.
