“Look,” he said. “How can I prove it wasn’t me?”
I stared at his hand as if it was a curse in itself. A trap. A test.
But something in me trembled. Some old instinct from when I believed he could be better. That maybe he hadn’t been the one. That maybe, all this time, I’d been rotting with the wrong man’s sin etched into my soul.
I stepped forward.
My fingers hovered above his palm.
I hesitated.
He didn’t move. He didn’t blink. Just waited.
And I…
I took hold of his hand.
Our fingers touched, and the world changed around us once more.
His awake mind was messy. Strange. Like a junk drawer brimming with loose change, postcards, broken pens, old love.
I floated through it, half-formed, tethered only by his touch. His regret. Mark was beside me, his mind cracked open willingly, offering no resistance this time. “I need you to see,” he whispered.
The room fell away. His bed, walls and house were gone in a blink. It was replaced with a haze of static and fog. It was thick. We moved through it, and at some point, it felt less like we were moving forward ourselves and more like we were gently being pulled. Memories flew by us.
His mind wasn’t orderly. Some memories were of him as a kid, some of him at his current age. No surprises there.
It wasn’t a reel of chronological flashbacks or a curated archive. It was a dumpster fire of suppressed emotion. Locked with chains, doors and taped-over regrets.
We stopped moving. I peered ahead of us, and the memory, hidden deep in the back, called to us. This is what Mark wanted me to see.
I shot forward and realise I’m at the reservoir clearing. The sun was bleeding through the treetops. Everything looked golden.
Soft. Too soft.
Like his memory was trying to romanticise the last time he supposedly saw me. Or was he hiding the true nature of it, the way I saw it, from himself? Grief and guilt had a way of distorting memory, after all.
I stood to the side, spectral and still.
Mark was driving, parking up the car with me in the passenger seat. We had arrived just as I remembered.
Then the current Mark standing next to me noticed too. And he flinched.
“This was our last good day before…”
“Good day?” I asked. “This was the worst day, the last time I thought I was safe.”
The memory flickered. The sun snapped, and we were suddenly standing under a shade-covered gazebo. He was ordering me not to get any ideas with his friends, not to speak unless spoken to. My eyes saw past-Mark grip my arm, the warning. It made past-me wince.
“See?” I snarled. “This is the man I remember. The aggressor.”
Mark hung his head in shame. “What was I thinking? I just wanted everything to be right. Wanted you to bemine.”
“You were a coward. Too worried about what others thought, even around others like you. These men were all sick, violent. Abusive. These were not friends. They were cruel sadists.” I stood in front of him and made him look at himself. “That included you.”
“No! I…I…” he stammered. He was shaking, and I didn’t let go. “I had a bad temper back then…I…”
Everything went hazy. Mark’s mind was taking us elsewhere. A graveyard.
