Poisoned. The word sat in the middle of my mind and didn’t move. I turned it over, pressed against it, tried to make it fit into sothing real — and couldn’t. It belonged to a different kind of story, a different kind of life. Not mine. Not this.
"Carl, are you sure? I’ve seen the prenatal reports. The pups and I are both healthy. Did soone alter the data?" I heard how desperate I sounded, the words tumbling out before I could shape them properly, but I couldn’t stop. Part of had already begun to wonder if I was losing my grip on reality entirely — if everything I thought I knew had been quietly rearranged while I wasn’t paying attention. My hand dropped to my belly without thinking, the way it always did now, automatic and instinctive. Rounded and noticeably so, carrying two lives I could feel even when everything else felt uncertain and shifting beneath . They were still there. Solid and real and entirely themselves. That much I could hold onto.
"Co back inside," Lewis said quietly. "Let’s talk." He didn’t wait for an answer. He lifted the way he always did — like it was simply the natural thing, like my weight was sothing he had always been prepared to carry — and brought back to the room, setting down on the bed with a gentleness that made my chest ache. I clung to his hand when he tried to pull away.
"Tell what it is. The poison — what is it called?"
"Scifen."
The na ant nothing to . It didn’t sound like anything dangerous. It sounded almost ordinary, almost forgettable, which perhaps was the point. "What does it do?"
He held my hand tighter, his grip firm and steady, like he was anchoring himself as much as . "It won’t harm the pups. But it targets your senses — your perception. The most significant effect is mory loss."
The air left my lungs in one slow, silent exhale. "So the repetition, losing track of ti, reaching for things that weren’t there anymore — that’s all been this?"
He nodded slowly, his eyes never leaving mine. "I didn’t tell you sooner because I didn’t want to frighten you. I’ve spent days consulting people, reaching out to anyone who might know sothing. There’s no antidote available. Nothing we can give you, and with the pregnancy, we can’t force any kind of intervention. We have to let it run its course."
A heaviness settled deep in my chest, the kind that doesn’t announce itself loudly — it just arrives and stays. "Carl. What’s going to happen to ?"
He exhaled, long and careful, the breath of a man choosing every word before he let it go. "The first sign was the drowsiness. We assud it was the pregnancy — it made sense, it fit. Then when everything happened with your sister, we thought you were grieving, that your mind was protecting itself the way minds do. But when the mory gaps kept coming back, kept widening, I had you tested. Most doctors here had never seen it before. Matthew had to track down a research facility overseas that had been studying it in isolation — the substance isn’t even classified as a poison yet because it’s still in developnt. The original purpose was to erase a specific window of mory. A few years, perhaps a decade, surgically precise. Since you haven’t been exposed for long, it’s only touched recent mories so far. We don’t yet know how far back it will eventually reach."
I went very still. The room felt smaller suddenly, the walls closer. Then sothing shifted at the edge of my thoughts — a flicker, a thread I hadn’t noticed before.
"Scifen," I said, almost to myself. The word turned slowly in my mind. "Vito. He once asked to pass so dicine to Whitney — said it would make her forget him. He frad it as kindness. Could that have been it?"
Lewis nodded, his jaw tight. "Your sister isn’t here, and the bottle is gone. I’ve reached out to Amber to see if she can get her hands on it."
"Any answer?"
He shook his head. "It looks like she and Vito separated after everything that happened. Besides the hairpin, she left nothing behind. She was being careful about it." A wave of disappointnt moved through , dull and familiar. Yael was probably sowhere safe by now — I had to believe that. The Blackwells felt like a Chapter that had already drawn its own curtain and closed. But mine hadn’t. Mine was still open, still bleeding.
"Carl." I looked at him steadily, even though sothing inside was shaking. "Who did this to ?"
The answer felt like it was already sowhere inside , hovering just beyond the reach of my own mind, close enough to feel but not to touch.
"Sergio."
It took a mont for the na to land. My old therapist. And even then, even with the na sitting right in front of , all I could produce was a vague and formless shape — the glasses, the compulsive precision of his office, everything lined up as though disorder were sothing to be feared. No face. Nothing with eyes or expression or humanity attached to it. He was already mostly gone. And it wasn’t just him. People I hadn’t known as well — Nelson, others whose nas surfaced briefly before sinking again — were already fading too, their outlines softening at the edges like photographs left in the rain. This thing didn’t erase you all at once. It was slower than that, and quieter, and far more patient. Like soone moving through a darkened room, lifting things from their shelves so carefully, so deliberately, that you didn’t notice the absence until you reached for sothing you needed and found only empty space where it used to be.
"Why would he do this?"
Lewis’s expression shifted. Sothing darker moved behind his eyes — not anger exactly, but sothing older and more complicated than anger. "You."
"? Do I have so history with him?"
"No," he said. "He was in love with you."
A faint mory stirred — a figure sitting across from in a sterile, over-organized office. Calm. Professional. asured to the point of feeling constructed. The image had no weight to it, no warmth, nothing that suggested obsession or love or anything hidden beneath the surface. It didn’t fit the shape of what Lewis was describing. But Lewis wouldn’t lie to about this. Not now.
"He loved , so he made forget?" The logic refused to assemble into anything coherent. I turned it from every angle and it still made no sense — love twisted into sothing unrecognizable, hollowed out until only possession remained.
Lewis cupped my face in both hands, his palms warm against my skin, his touch so deliberate it felt like a statent. "If I’m right, his real target was never your past. He wanted you to forget ."
My eyes went wide.
I threw my arms around him before I could think, before I could find words or reason or any kind of composure. I pressed my face into his chest and held on with everything I had — every ounce of strength left in , every piece of myself that was still intact. His heartbeat was steady beneath my ear, his scent so deeply familiar that it lived sowhere below thought, written into the oldest part of , the part that didn’t require mory to know its mate. How could I ever lose this? How could anyone reach inside a person and take sothing this fundantal, this cellular, this bone-deep?
But even as I held him, I felt it — faint and terrible and undeniable. Sothing like an hourglass turning slowly inside , grains slipping through a gap I couldn’t find or close no matter how tightly I pressed my hands together. Every grain was a mont. Every mont was him. A laugh I might lose. The exact way he said my na. The particular weight of his silence when he was thinking. All of it moving through and away from at once, and nothing I could do to stop it.
"Don’t be afraid." His voice was low, his arms wrapped around completely, one hand at the back of my head, the other at my back, holding like I was sothing worth guarding. "Even if you forget, Elena — as long as we’re breathing, as long as we’re together, we can find each other again. I’ll tell you every day. I’ll remind you every single ti. I’ll make you fall in love with as many tis as it takes."
He pulled back just enough to see my face, and wiped the tears from the corner of my eye with his thumb, so carefully, so gently, like the gesture itself was sothing he wanted to rember.
I looked up at him and held his gaze — really held it, the way you hold sothing precious when you know it might not stay — wanting to press his face into so place inside so deep that nothing, no substance, no absence, no slow erosion of ti or mory could ever reach it.
"Carl," I said, and the word ca out like a vow, because that was exactly what it was. "No matter when. No matter where. No matter how many tis I have to find my way back — I will fall in love with you again."
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