The Hand That Saved Me

Julia — First-Person POV

The memory kept coming.

I couldn't stop it. Couldn't slow it down or manage it or decide which parts arrived first and which came later. It simply came — the way things came when they had been buried under pressure for decades and the pressure was finally gone. All at once. Unsealed.

A locked room.

The specific smell of it — institutional cleaning products and something underneath that, something that wasn't cleanable, the smell of fear accumulated in a space over time.