Memory is a cruel architect.
It builds rooms you forgot existed —
then locks you inside them
without giving you the key.
─── ∘◦ ❁ ◦∘ ───
FLASHBACK
"Shreya. Wake up. You will be late for school."
Mom's knuckles landed on the door in that familiar, non-negotiable rhythm — the one that meant she had already tried twice and was now operating on zero patience. I scrambled upright, pulled myself together faster than I thought possible, and thundered downstairs.
They were already waiting.
Percy. My sister. Both of them bright-eyed and buzzing with the particular electricity that only comes from one thing — excursion day. The kind of morning that feels like the beginning of something rather than just another Tuesday wearing a costume.
We looked identical, my sister and I. Same face. Same build. Same way of tilting our heads when we were thinking. The only way to tell us apart — the only way I could tell us apart, sometimes — was the blue necklace I wore around my neck. A small, quiet anchor to the question of which one am I today.
Percy stood near the door, smiling at me the way he always did — like I was the answer to something he had been trying to work out for a long time.
We were so happy.
We had no idea.
─── ∘◦ ❁ ◦∘ ───
PRESENT
I came back to consciousness the way you surface from deep water — slowly, painfully, with the terrible awareness that breathing is going to hurt before it gets easier.
Darkness.
Thick. Pressing. The kind that has weight.
Fragments of the flashback still clung to the inside of my skull — Percy, my sister, the blue necklace, the excursion, the last morning everything was still intact — and then the present rushed in like cold water through a broken window, and I understood where I was.
Percy.
The boy Pierre had warned me about.
The boy currently holding me captive.
My ex-boyfriend.
The realisation didn't arrive gently. It detonated — slow and catastrophic — somewhere behind my ribs. Hot tears carved silently down my cheeks before I could decide whether I wanted them to or not.
Who was I before the accident?
Who had I been to him?
After the accident, the world had quietly rearranged itself around my absence. Mom had stayed — Mom always stayed — but everyone else had maintained a careful, unexplained distance, as though grief and guilt had the same face and no one could look directly at either. I had woken up to a life that fit me like someone else's clothes. New school. New neighbourhood. New self — built from the fragments that remained after whatever I used to be had shattered beyond anyone's willingness to explain.
St. Joseph's. That was where Caleb found me.
That was where I thought the story began.
Apparently, it had started much earlier.
I filed it away. After this. After I get out of this, I will find a psychiatrist and I will sit in that office and I will not leave until someone tells me who I actually am.
But first — this.
"Remember me now?"
Percy's voice slid into the darkness like something that had practiced being charming for so long it had forgotten it was performing. That familiar sweetness — the one that had apparently once made me feel safe — now made the hair on my arms stand at full attention.
Play dumb. Buy time. Get answers later.
"Wh — what are you talking ab — about?"
Fear coloured every syllable whether I wanted it to or not. My voice shook. My hands shook. The room shook — or maybe that was just my body deciding it had had enough.
What happened to him? The question moved through me like smoke. What turned someone I apparently loved into whatever this is?
And the answer that followed it, quieter and more devastating: Why did I break up with him?
Because somewhere in the fog of everything I couldn't remember, I had. And whatever my reasons were, Past Shreya had taken them with her when she left.
"Bitch. Do you remember now?"
The wall met my back before I registered the movement. A sound left me that I didn't choose — sharp, involuntary, the body's honest response to sudden pain when the mind is too slow to intervene.
He kept talking. Words that blurred together at the edges, pointed and relentless, aimed at the version of me he thought was still standing in that room. I let them blur. I focused on breathing. I focused on the blood I could see on the floor —
My blood.
The floor came up to meet me. I didn't remember deciding to fall.
How long have I been here?
Time had become a suggestion. My consciousness flickered at the edges like a candle in a draft — present enough to register, too diminished to act. His voice continued somewhere above me, cursing the air, cursing me, cursing something I couldn't locate.
Then — a different voice.
"She doesn't know anything, you fool."
Justin.
Something in my chest moved at the sound of him — recognition, relief, confusion all arriving simultaneously. How did he find me? How did he know?
"So." Percy's voice shifted — colder now, stripped of its performance. "If it weren't for the accident... she would still have been mine."
Mine. The word landed like a verdict.
Hands found me — two of them, steady and certain — lifting me from the floor with a deliberateness that suggested someone who had already made a decision and wasn't open to discussion. I didn't fight. I couldn't have if I tried. My body had officially submitted its resignation.
Then the voice came.
Low. Controlled. The kind of voice that doesn't raise itself because it has never needed to.
"She is not your property."
A pause. Weighted. Surgical.
"And for the record — after the way you treated her — stay away from her."
Another pause. Shorter. Final.
"Because she is mine."
Mine.
Again that word — but wearing an entirely different face.
My eyes opened against every instruction my body was giving me. And there he was.
The Prince of Hell himself.
Adithya.
Carrying me.
His eyes were on my face with an intensity that did several things to my pulse that I was entirely unprepared for — and the absolute last thing I needed in this moment was for my treacherous heart to develop opinions. A small, infuriating grin crossed his face, brief and certain, like he had read every single thought currently rioting through my head.
I closed my eyes immediately.
Absolutely not.
"Take her to the hospital," Justin's voice cut through. "I'll deal with the rest."
And that was the last thing I held onto before darkness collected me entirely.
─── ∘◦ ❁ ◦∘ ───
I surfaced to the sound of familiar voices.
The hospital room resolved itself around me slowly — white ceiling, antiseptic quiet, the distant beep of something monitoring a heart that was apparently still committed to functioning. Outside the door, three voices moved through conversation like water finding its level.
Pierre. Daniel. Adithya.
I didn't move. I listened.
"I had warned her," Pierre was saying, her voice carrying the particular texture of someone trying to sound calm and failing just slightly. "I told her — if anything unusual happened, she should call me immediately."
"Why would anything unusual happen to her?" Adithya's voice. Measured. But with something underneath it — something that had weight.
Through the narrow gap of the door I could see Pierre falter under his gaze — that specific, full-pressure attention he deployed like a searchlight. And then Daniel, quiet and instinctive, simply put his arm around her and said something soft enough that only she could hear it.
Oh.
They were definitely a thing.
"She helped me escape," Pierre said finally. "By lying."
The quality of the silence that followed told me Adithya had turned to look at me through the glass.
I closed my eyes and pretended to still be unconscious.
I was not ready for that conversation.
I was not ready, as it turned out, at all.
Because the first thing he said when I eventually, unavoidably, undeniably woke up — with witnesses, in a hospital bed, with nowhere to retreat — was this:
"Why did you do that?"
No hello. No how are you feeling. No I'm glad you're alive.
Just — why did you do that — delivered with those furrowed brows and that expression that made the air in the room feel approximately fifteen degrees colder than it had been a moment ago.
I smiled nervously. Coughed once for credibility.
"Dude," Pierre said, from somewhere to my left, "she literally just woke up."
Thank you, Pierre. Green signal confirmed. Fully and completely.
"What she did was dangerous—"
"Why do you care?"
The question left me before I could evaluate whether asking it was wise. We weren't friends. We were barely acquaintances. He was a stranger wearing the face of someone my instincts kept insisting I already knew — and I didn't have the context to understand why, which made the whole thing significantly more unsettling.
Why does being near him feel like remembering something I was never consciously taught?
"Because you are—"
"Adi."
Justin's voice arrived like a door being firmly closed. "It's your sister. She's back. And Percy knows."
The sentence rearranged the entire atmosphere of the room in under four seconds.
Adithya went very still.
Then he stood, and something closed behind his eyes — a shutter coming down, smooth and practiced — and he leaned toward me instead, and for one completely disorienting moment the world contracted to just this: his hand cupping my face, careful as though I were something worth being careful with, and his lips pressing to my forehead with a quiet, deliberate tenderness that made every coherent thought I possessed evaporate simultaneously.
"I'll be back."
A breath. Almost a smile.
"My princess."
He left before I could construct a single response. Pierre and Daniel followed. The door closed behind them with a soft, definitive click.
I stared at the ceiling.
My princess.
What.
The warmth his touch had left behind refused to be reasoned with. My heart was doing things that were frankly unprofessional given my current medical situation, and every sensible argument I attempted to make — I don't know him. I don't know myself. I don't know anything — bounced uselessly off the memory of his voice saying those two words like they were simply, quietly, inarguably true.
Why am I falling for him?
I cannot fall for him.
I don't even know who I am.
─── ∘◦ ❁ ◦∘ ───
Justin remained.
He stood near the window with the expression of someone who had been carrying something heavy for a very long time and was beginning to feel the strain of it in places that didn't show.
"Justin."
He turned.
"Who is Percy to me?"
I watched him carefully. I needed to see what the truth did to his face before he decided whether or not to give it to me.
His jaw tightened. Barely. But I saw it.
"Why?" He exhaled slowly, the sound of someone buying seconds. "Do you remember something?"
"Are you willing to give Adithya another chance?"
The question arrived from nowhere — from him — and landed directly in the centre of everything I was unprepared for.
"I know you knew him," Justin continued, the words coming out measured, careful, like someone walking across ice they haven't fully tested. "I know you knew him a long time ago. And I kept it from you — I had to keep it from you — because knowing would have cost you your life." He stopped. Something crossed his face. "Percy caused the accident, Shreya."
The sentence detonated quietly.
"And—"
He stopped.
He had seen my face.
He understood, in the way people understand when they have accidentally walked into a room they weren't supposed to enter, that I had no idea. That none of it — not the accident, not the history, not the version of myself that had apparently loved and lost and nearly died — had come back to me yet.
His hand moved to cover his face.
The silence was the heaviest thing in the room.
Tears fell from my eyes without permission — hot, helpless, the tears of someone who has just been told their own life is a story they haven't been allowed to read.
Another chance. With a boy I don't remember. Who apparently knew a version of me I can't access. Who held my face like something precious and called me his princess and left with the confident ease of someone who expected to be waited for.
"Who am I, Justin?"
He looked at me for a long time.
And I knew — with the particular clarity that arrives when you stop hoping for a lie — that he was not going to tell me.
"Can you at least tell me what happened between me and Adithya?"
"No." His voice was quiet. Final. Something in it broke just slightly at the edges. "It's not my place." A pause. "But someday — I truly hope you'll forgive me."
He walked out.
The door closed.
And I was left alone in the white quiet of the hospital room, suspended somewhere between a past I couldn't remember and a future I couldn't yet imagine — with nothing but the ghost of a forehead kiss, the echo of a name I apparently used to answer to, and the slow, terrifying realisation that the girl I was looking for had been here all along.
I just hadn't been given permission to find her yet.
─── ∘◦ ❁ ◦∘ ───
She didn't know her name.
She didn't know her story.
She didn't know the boy who held her face like she was the thing worth saving.
But somewhere, deep beneath the fog of everything she had lost —
Shreya was beginning, quietly, furiously,
to remember.
To be continued...