Page 206 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

She was trying to kill me.

That was the only explanation.

The smiles, the winks, the way she existed in a room like she was the only source of light. She wanted me dead at her feet.

I couldn’t even complain.

If this was how I was supposed to go, I was dying a happy man.

She finished the cake, licked the last of the frosting from her spoon, and stood. My eyes followed her to the desk, watched her shuffle through a few papers, watched her pick something up.

When she came back, she settled onto the couch beside me—closer than before, her knee almost brushing mine.

She was quiet for a moment.

Thinking.

Her fingers tapped against her thigh, once, twice.

Then she said something that doused me like a bucket of cold water.

“I have your father’s number.”

The words didn’t make sense.

They didn’t feel real.

They barely registered as anything at all. Just sounds. Letters arranged in an order that should have meant something, but instead meant nothing at all.

She looked at me like she understood. Like she knew exactly what it cost to hear a name you’d buried come back into the light.

She placed a folded piece of paper in my hand, the crease soft from being held for a while.

Numbers.

A door that could open or stay closed forever.

She told me everything. How she got it. Why she had it. Where he was. What he wanted. Her voice was steady, factual, the same voice she used for timelines and press releases and damage control.

But underneath it, there was something softer.

I kept staring at the numbers. They blurred. Resolved. Blurred again. They felt like living things, crawling across the page, laughing at me, mocking the boy who had once waited by the window for a father who never came back.

A hand touched my arm.

Warm. Solid. Here.

“Cassian.” Her voice pulled me out of the spiral. I followed it, followed her. “You don’t have to do anything right now. Not if you don’t want to.” Her thumb traced a slow circle on my sleeve. “You can keep this. Put it somewhere and decide later. Or you can put it somewhere you never have to look at it. Or you can call him.” She paused. “You can do whatever you want.”

Her voice was soft.

So fucking soothing.

I wanted to take it with me everywhere. I wanted to live inside it, build a room around it, stay there forever where nothing could touch me and everything she said was the only thing I ever had to hear.

I looked back at the paper.

The numbers hadn’t changed.