Mara opened her eyes to a sky that felt too close and too sharp, the blinds cut into thinner, harder lines across the ceiling. For a moment she lay there, listening to the small domestic noises of her apartment — the radiator ticking, a refrigerator somewhere in the building, distant footsteps — and catalogued them as she always did, like samples on a tray: ordinary, reliable. Then the ache at the temple insisted on attention. She pressed a palm to her left brow and felt the bruise, dull and tender under the skin, and a slow, awful vertigo spread from the point of contact outward. She tasted metal; sleep left the rest of her like a curtain pulled.
Her phone, face-down on the bedside table, had a new light blinking where it should not. When she scooped it up the lock screen was smeared with a faint fingerprint, and an unfamiliar memo icon pulsed with the soft red of a recent recording. She tapped it and her own voice — thin, slightly strained, unmistakably hers — said, in a clipped, repeated cadence: I kept the promise. The way it was framed made it neither a confession nor a question; it was a lodestone, a thing meant to be found and to mean.
Mara worked with other people's memories for a living. She repaired photographs for museums and private collectors, coaxing age and damage into legible order, lifting residues of time from emulsion so that faces could return to themselves. That skill had once felt like a vocation in the service of truth; lately it had become a quiet, private labor that kept her steady. She could sit with a tear or a stain for hours, teaching the paper to tell its story again. Now, confronted with a voice memo she did not remember recording, the craft felt like theatre: she could restore an image but not the life behind it.
She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and the bruise reminded her it was real. Her coat lay in a heap over a chair, oddly tidy for someone who had apparently been out the night before. When she shoved a hand into the pocket she found a small, cold object: a brass key, its head worn smooth, its shaft nicked in a line that suggested a lock used often. It bore no tag or number. For a wondering second she let the key warm in her palm, as if warmth could summon a memory. It did not.
On the kitchen counter, underneath a sheet of architectural prints she had been cataloguing, there was a single photographic print she did not recognize. She had been cataloguing a box of nineteenth-century studio portraits for two days and knew every face in the tray; this image did not belong. The emulsion had the matte grain of a modern contact print; the subject was a man thirty or so, his jaw a clean line, his coat open at the collar. Mara recognized herself half in the frame: a sweep of hair behind her ear, a shadow on the cheek that matched the fresh bruise now blooming at her temple. The photograph had been handled — a crease at one corner, the soft thumb-print gloss where someone had lingered over it. Her breath came shorter. She set the key and the print side by side on the counter as if laying out clues in a case file. They did not explain themselves.