Chapter 310: I remember all I did
Three years later
The office was on the tenth floor of the building that smelled like paper and printer ink. Seren knew the smell now. She had memorized it over three visits.
She stood in the corridor outside the frosted glass door that read Amara Piers Vale, CEO, her school bag digging into her shoulder, her heart doing the thing it always did here, that painful, squeezing thing she had no name for yet, though she was almost thirteen and felt certain she was old enough to name most things.
She was not old enough to name this.
The receptionist, a small woman named Ms. Adelaide who wore reading glasses on a beaded chain, looked up from her desk and recognized Seren immediately. Her expression did something complicated. Not unkind. Just complicated.
"She has a client until three-thirty," Ms. Adelaide said, before Seren could open her mouth.
"I know." Seren shifted her bag. "I can wait."
Ms.Adelaide looked at her for a long moment. Then she looked back down at her computer. "The chairs are against the wall."
Seren sat.
The corridor has a huge visitor’s waiting area, the chairs bolted together in a row. She had sat in these chairs twice before.
The first time, she had been shaking so badly that her teeth knocked against each other, and she had to press her jaw shut with her hand. The second time, she had cried before she even reached the door and had to sit for forty minutes composing herself, and then Amara had already left for a meeting, and she had missed her entirely.
This was the third time.
She had told herself, walking here from school, that the number three meant something. That three was the number of times you were supposed to try before the universe let you know whether a thing was possible or not. She was not sure she actually believed that. But she needed to believe something.
She pulled her school notebook from her bag and set it on her knees. She had written things down. She always wrote things down now, because her memory, the one she was only beginning to trust again, still felt fragile to her, like a web after rain. Intact, but trembling.
She opened the notebook.
Things I remember.
The list went on for six pages. She had been adding to it for almost a year, since the memories had started coming back in pieces, the way a broken thing surfaces from floodwater slowly, in fragments, each one worse than the last.
The first memory had come back on a Tuesday morning in October.
She had been brushing her teeth, and she had seen, reflected behind her own face in the bathroom mirror, the ghost of the same bathroom. Warmer. Yellow tile. A red toothbrush in a ceramic mug shaped like a frog.
She had stood there, toothbrush still in her mouth, and the memory had poured back like a tide returning not gently. She had been sitting on the edge of that yellow bathtub, five years old, and
Amara had been kneeling on the bath mat, working conditioner through Seren’s tangled hair with careful, unhurried fingers, singing something low and tuneless to herself. Not performing. Just singing because she felt like it.
Seren had pulled the toothbrush out and stood very still and thought: " That happened. That was real.
And then the next memory had come. And the next. And the one after that. The good ones came first.
Amara’s hands in her hair. Amara’s voice reading to her long books, Chapter by Chapter, every night, never skipping. The smell of pasta on Sundays.
The way Amara had framed Seren’s first proper painting, a crooked, lopsided thing Seren had been embarrassed by, and hung it on the living room wall as though it were art.
The good ones made her feel something warm and then immediately something terrible, because warmth was followed by the weight of what came after.
The bad memories came next.
These were harder to write down. But she had written them anyway, because she was almost thirteen and she understood in the way you understand things when the understanding has cost you something that you do not get to curate your own history.
I told Amara her cooking was disgusting when it wasn’t.
I told her she wasn’t my real mother when she was crying.
I pretend to be hurt so daddy will not go to her when she is badly hurt because Elara told me Amara was trying to take daddy from me. I said it to Amara’s face.
I let Elara say things about Amara, and I said nothing. I laughed once. I laughed.
She could not look at that line without her throat closing. She had drawn a small circle next to it in pen, pressing hard, gone over and over it until the paper was almost worn through.
She had laughed. She was six. She had not known what she was doing. She had known. She closed the notebook and looked at the frosted glass door.
At three-forty-two, a woman came out of the office with a young boy beside her, his hand tucked inside hers, his face the particular emptiness of a child who has been crying for a long time. Seren watched them pass. The boy looked at her briefly and looked away.
Ms. Adelaide’s phone buzzed on her desk. A pause.
"Yes," Ms. Adelaide said quietly. And then: "She’s been here since half past two." Another pause. "I know. All right."
She set the phone down and looked at Seren over her reading glasses. "You can go in."
Seren stood up. Her legs felt strange. She walked to the door and pushed it open.
Amara’s office was spacious and elegantly designed, reflecting both sophistication and quiet authority. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the company parking lot, and beyond it stretched a narrow strip of pewter-colored sky, heavy with gathering clouds.
Despite the limited sunlight filtering through the glass, a lush green potted plant thrived on the windowsill, its vibrant leaves adding a touch of warmth and life to the otherwise polished, modern space.
The room was immaculate, every piece of furniture carefully chosen, creating an atmosphere that was both welcoming and undeniably professional.
Amara was standing at the window with her back to the door.
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