Sean

I wake up gasping, the name already on my tongue.

Cercis.

The dream slips away the moment my eyes open, like smoke through clenched fingers, but the feeling lingers. Sharp and familiar, yet somehow, wrong. My heart pounds as if I've been running, though I'm still buried in white sheets in a room that doesn't feel like mine.

I reach for my journal before the fear can fade.

I've learned to do this fast. Dreams don't wait for me anymore.

My hand shakes as I write, trying to trap every detail before it dissolves: white hair, cut unevenly, as if scissors were never patient with her. Eyes I can't remember the color of, only that they look at me like they know something I don't. A voice I can't hear, lips moving just out of reach.

And her name.

Every page comes back to that same name.

Cercis Aragon.

I flip through the journal once I'm done. Page after page, the same handwriting, the same panic, the same name circled, underlined, written larger as if size might make it clearer. I don't remember my childhood. I don't remember school, friends, first love, first heartbreak. I don't remember the incident. My father made sure of that. 

But somehow, impossibly, I remember her.

Not who she is. Just that she exists.

Sometimes I ask my family. My parents exchange looks and tell me vague things that feel rehearsed, as if they agreed long ago on what they're allowed to say. My brother Seymour is worse. Or better. I can't tell.

"Cercis?" he'll say, smirking. "Ah yes. That sarcastic little gremlin."

Another time, he leans closer and lowers his voice. "Cercis? The mother of your child."

Once, without smiling at all, he mutters, "Yeah. Cercis is scared of me."

I never know which version of him to believe. Seymour lives comfortably between truth and lies, and he knows it. Maybe that's why he unsettles me more than my parents' silence. Fifty percent of the time he's joking. Fifty percent of the time he's not. I don't know which half scares me more.

Years pass abroad. Treatments after treatments. Rest after rest. Doctors who tell me I'm "recovering well" without explaining what, exactly, I'm recovering from. When we finally return home, everything feels too large, too quiet, like a place that's been waiting for me to remember something I can't.

I walk the estate gardens when my parents think I need air but not answers. The paths are unfamiliar in a way that makes my head ache.

That's when one of the guards calls my name.

He hands me a book. Says a girl left it for me earlier. White hair. Gave him a card, but he lost it.

White hair.

My pulse stutters.

I sit on the nearest bench before my legs give out and open the book with hands that suddenly don't feel like my own.

On the first page, written neatly, deliberately, as if she knew this moment would come, are the words:

Remember me.

Remember our story.