Yet there’s one significant piece that has bothered me formonths. Not what’s in the article, not what’s mentioned—but what’s not.
The date the disappearances suddenly stopped.
I tuck the worn page beneath my most recent puzzle. It’s only half complete, but it’s already revealing so much of the picture. I scrape a jagged piece off the table and twirl it around my fingers, envisioning the golden flecks in her eyes.
My little psychologist has been living two lives for far too long, and I want to tease them apart. Like the puzzle I stare at now, the woman I need hides in the details. She’s buried beneath the lies.
Buried. Hmm, I like that.
I uncover the three-dimensional model on the table, the one I’ve been adding layers to for months. It’s a poor substitute for my welding tools and kits at the house, but I almost appreciate the challenge to create out of practically nothing. Layered paper and formed cardboard, a makeshift trap that has yet to be realized.
The obsession has to be fed.
I tear a corner from one of my puzzle boxes and fold the cardboard into a rectangle. It’s not ideal, but the crude box will do as I slip it onto the model with a smile.
It’s only a matter of time until all the pieces come together, and the picture is complete.
I tuck the model beneath the table, hiding it from view before I return to the jigsaw puzzle—a portrait of London. I carefully trimmed and shaped a picture of her to overlay perfectly onto each piece. The one I’m holding finds its home as I slide it effortlessly into place, revealing those eyes that captivate me
I graze my knuckles over her features, aroused by the tantalizing feel of the beveled edges of the linked puzzle pieces.
She’s almost complete.
Almost mine.
I continue to caress her completed puzzle long after the lights blink out.
10
FLIGHT
LONDON
Memories are deceptive.
Each time we revisit one, our minds subtly alter the details. Reshaping, rewriting, distorting reality into something a little different from what actually occurred. The truth is, no two people recall a past event the same.
Very few understand this, and it can be unsettling, even frightening, when they realize this truth.
Like a married couple having the same argument night after night, each stubbornly insisting the other is wrong, each adamant their version is correct.
In reality, they’re both right. Their memories have been altered by their minds to reinforce their personal narratives—the truths that shape their identities and beliefs to determine how they perceive the world around them.
I wrote a paper on this once, back in my first year. Fresh out of college, I was eager to unravel the origins of a murderer’s mind. Was it nurture, the environment and experiences, thatcreated a killer? Or was it the way their mind perceived those first impressionable years that ultimately fashioned them into one?
Most would argue that they’re one and the same, that there’s no distinction between the reality of our past and how we remember it—that the outcome, either way, still creates a monster.
This is chiefly true. It’s nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction, so why spend our time debating theories or picking apart the particulars?
I was young, and in my youth I bent to the psychology of the masses. I abandoned my thesis, dismissing my ideas and how they might pertain to my patients. It was irrelevant for my area of focus as I furthered my career with killers and their rehabilitation.
To move forward, I had to stop looking back, recalling my own memories of the past. How many times had I gone over the details? How many times had my mind warped those events? Were my memories even real anymore, or just fragments of the truth tangled with my nightmares? Like an old tape that’s been recorded over too many times, my memories now play back a garbled, corrupted song.
I shove my hands into my coat pockets as I follow the winding path through the lush aviary garden. The birds twitter along to the distorted tune in my head, their high-pitched calls punctuating each spike of anxiety.
I thought a walk through one of my favorite places might calm me, an escape I’ve turned to countless times to quiet my thoughts, but the birds swooping overhead seem to grow louder, more agitated, as if sensing the weight of the secret I’ve carried too long.
And obviously, after what transpired with Grayson, I’m just losing it.
