<sub>"There are people out there that will tell you that the memories are all just random chemical coding stored in the nerves inside of your brain, and that false memories can be fabricated just as easily as real ones, as long as you know what you're doing. I’ve asked them," she said.

"Scary thought," I responded, considering that the people she’d asked might be the kind of people that would do something like that, given the right equipment and a willing subject. Once upon a time, I chose to believe that there was something out there beyond what was easily explainable. Today, that something meant that a strange girl had become a part of my life and her story was a little beyond what seemed to be true... and I caught myself overanalyzing it all, something I tended to do that had broken apart trust in relationships before her, something I had learned to do as an unwilling defensive mechanism as a result of the divorce. But I trusted her, for whatever reason, and in doing so; it meant that I accepted her mysterious past as part of the deal.

"I’ve asked a man to try to help me recall things, you know,” she said, standing up off the swing. I stayed put, not winding the chains up anymore.

"Did it work?" I asked, assuming that they'd followed through.
"He wouldn't do it. He said he might be able to, if we broke into a hospital or a medical lab somewhere, but he feels that if we made the effort that there is too large a margin of error and that it could potentially do more harm than good, permanently erasing parts of more than just my memory, going into my personality and identity itself."
"A risk you shouldn't take," I finished for her.

"A risk that he's not willing to take, at least not yet. We’ve only been talking for a few weeks, so he's giving me more time to recover the memories on my own”.

"Well, I for one am glad that you're taking more time to remember things instead of utilizing the invasive approach. I really enjoy you being around, and would hate it if you wiped your mind clean and forgot all about me, too!" I said, watching her as she walked around, circling a park bench.

She smiled and kept circling.

"What's his name, anyway?" I asked, out of curiosity.

"Partain. Dr. Evan Partain," she said.</sub>