Chapter Eighteen: The Memory

Elena’s POV

I stood in the middle of the room with the key card still clenched in my free hand and my father’s voice still ringing in my ears.

*You are not supposed to be there.*

*Get out of the room.*

*Do not touch anything else.*

The words sat heavy in my chest, heavier than the sling, heavier than the ache in my arm. Samantha watched me from a few steps away, her face tight with the same unease that had settled over both of us the moment we stepped inside. The flowers still filled the air with that soft, familiar scent. The bracelet rested on the table where I had set it down. The photograph lay beside it, the cut-away figure and the four careful words on the back burning in my mind.

*You promised you’d never forget me.*

I turned toward the door.

But my legs suddenly strangely distanced, as if they belonged to someone else. I took one step.

Then another.

The carpet muffled the sound. Samantha moved with me, already reaching for the handle.

A sharp, white pain exploded behind my eyes.

It was sudden and absolute, like a blade driven straight through the center of my skull. The room tilted. The walls seemed to lean inward. The flowers blurred into soft streaks of white and pale blue. I tried to speak,to tell Samantha something was wrong,but my tongue would not move. My knees folded. The floor rose to meet me.

The last clear thing I saw was the bracelet. It had somehow found its way against my wrist again, the silver cool, the tiny blue stone catching the light as everything else went dark.

Then there was nothing.

……..

I opened my eyes to sunlight.

Warmth pressed against my face and the backs of my hands. The air smelled of earth and green things and something sweet I could not name. Grass tickled my bare ankles. Somewhere nearby, water moved quietly, a soft trickle that belonged to a fountain or a narrow stream.

I was standing in a garden.

It was not the hotel room. It was not any place I knew in my life. The paths were gravel, carefully raked. Beds of white lilies and pale blue hydrangeas stretched in every direction, their petals open to the afternoon light. Tall iron fences rose at the edges, half-hidden by climbing roses. The sky above was a clear, high blue without a single cloud.

Everything felt real. The heat of the sun on my skin. The slight give of the soil under my feet. The way the breeze moved through the leaves. Yet something was wrong. The garden was unnaturally quiet. No birds. No distant traffic. No adult voices. Only the faint sound of something large shifting behind a fence farther away.

I looked down at myself and felt a jolt of confusion.

My hands were smaller.

My arms were thin and unmarked.

And there was no sling.

No ache from the gunshot wound. I was a child again,ten, maybe eleven,wearing a simple summer dress the color of soft cream. My hair fell loose around my shoulders.

I turned in a slow circle, my heart beginning to race.

A boy stood several yards away among the flowers.

He looked about the same age as the child-version of me. Thick dark hair fell across his forehead in uneven pieces. His eyebrows were already sharp, giving his face a seriousness that did not belong to someone so young. His eyes were a striking gray-blue, the color of deep water under a bright sky. He held a single white lily between his fingers, turning it carefully as if studying the way the light moved through the petals.

He was calm.

Composed.

Unusually still for a boy his age.

I felt an immediate, inexplicable sense of familiarity, as if I had looked at that face a hundred times before and simply forgotten.

Then I noticed the other me.

A few feet to my left, the younger version of myself sat on the grass with her knees drawn up and her face buried in her arms. She was crying hard,quiet, shaking sobs that made her shoulders tremble. She was trying to hide the sound, trying to make herself small.

The boy looked up.

He saw her at once. Without hesitation he set the lily down and ran across the grass. He dropped to his knees beside her.

“Why are you crying?”

His voice was soft at the edges, careful. Not mocking. Not impatient.

Young me did not answer. She only pressed her face harder into her arms.

He suddenly reached out and gently took her wrists, easing her hands away from her face. She resisted for a second, then let him. Tear tracks shone on her cheeks. He used the cuff of his sleeve to wipe them away, the motion awkward but determined.

“You don’t have to hide,” he said. “I won’t tell anyone.”

She stared at him through wet lashes, suspicion and exhaustion mixed together.

He held out his hand, palm up.

“You can call me Kolia.”

The name landed in the air between them like something that had always belonged there.

Young me hesitated. Then, in a small, cracked voice, she told him her name.

“Elena.”

He repeated it once, quietly, as if he were memorizing the shape of it.

“Elena.”