11. The Flood
The Flood
Bliss
The first thing I remember is yellow.
Not the pale yellow of the institute walls, chosen by someone who thinks softness can be manufactured.
Real yellow. Montreal yellow. Morning light spilling through the kitchen window while my mother stands barefoot at the stove, stirring sugar into coffee and scolding me in French because I’ve left brushes soaking in her best teacup again.
Colette.
Maman.
Her name comes back with her face, sharp and complete, dark hair twisted into a knot, red lipstick before breakfast, earrings shaped like tiny suns. She smells like vanilla, turpentine, and expensive perfume she pretends was on sale.
The memory hits so hard my knees almost give.
Matthias catches my elbow.
“Bliss.”
His voice is careful. Close. Real.
I try to answer, but another memory tears open before I can hold the first one.
My father at the piano.
Smoke in a narrow bar. Blue light over his hands. Jacques Fontaine singing in a voice rough enough to hurt and warm enough to keep listening. He looks up mid-song and winks at me because I’m ten and sleepy and sitting beneath a table with a sketchbook on my knees, drawing strangers’ shoes.
Papa.
I make a sound I don’t recognize.
Matthias lowers me into the chair, one hand steady at my shoulder, the other already reaching for the glass of water on the table.
“Stay with my voice,” he says. “You’re in the integration room. It’s Tuesday afternoon. I adjusted your protocol. The memories are yours.”
Mine.
The word splits something open.
My studio comes back next. Brick walls. North-facing windows. Paint tubes everywhere. Music too loud. Coffee gone cold. A canvas taller than me taking shape while my hair sticks to my neck and my fingers ache from holding the brush too long. Red. Gold. Purple. Blue so bright it feels alive.
Then the fire.
I smell it before I see it.
Burned wood. Melted plastic. Wet ash. Canvas blistering.
My paintings curling black at the edges while firefighters shout from somewhere too far away.
Years of work turning to smoke. My hands over my mouth.
My mother holding me back. My own voice saying no, no, no until the word stops meaning anything.
Then Meridian.
The intake forms.
Dr. Strauss smiling.
“You’re safe here, Bliss.”
The first cup of pills.
The first missing morning.
The first time I looked at my mother and knew she was mine, but couldn’t find the feeling that belonged to knowing.
I bend forward, gripping the edge of the chair until my nails scrape the underside.
“They took her from me,” I whisper.
“Your mother?”
“Maman. Papa. My colors. Me.”
The room tilts, but Matthias keeps his hand on my shoulder.
“You’re remembering because they failed,” he says.
I lift my head, tears hot on my face.
“They made me forget my father’s voice.”
“Yes.”
“They made me paint grey.”
“For now.”
I look toward the locked cabinet.
The paints are still in there.
So am I.
Meridian Memory Institute, Rural Oregon. 1415 hours
The sound that comes out of me doesn’t belong to the woman they taught to lower her voice.
It tears through the creative integration room, sharp enough to make Matthias step back and human enough to make me hate every silent hour I gave them.
I scream until my throat burns. Until the blank clock above the shelves blurs.
Until the white walls stop looking soft and start looking like teeth.
Matthias doesn’t tell me to calm down.
That saves him.
The water glass hits the floor first, shattering beside the table.
A tray of grey paint follows, flipping end over end before it smears across the tiles like dirty rain.
Brushes scatter. Paper tears beneath my hands.
I grab the worksheet Strauss made me fill out yesterday, the one asking me to identify three emotions I could release and rip it straight down the middle.
“Bliss,” Matthias says, but he doesn’t come closer. “You’re safe with me.”
“No.” My voice breaks around the word. “I was safe before him. Before this place. Before they made me smaller and called it healing.”
My gaze snaps to the locked cabinet.
Color.
I cross the room before he can stop me and yank at the handle.
It holds.
“Open it.”
“Bliss.”
“Open it!”
He moves then, fast and quiet, checking the corridor before taking a small tool from his pocket. The lock gives with a clean click.
Inside, the colors wait.
Red. Black. White. Blue. Yellow. Green.
Life in tubes, stolen and stored like contraband.
I take red first. The cap twists off beneath my fingers, and I squeeze paint directly onto the canvas, thick and violent.
Black cuts through it. White drags across both, bright as bone.
I don’t use a brush at first. I use my hands, palms, knuckles, nails, pushing color over the grey until the fog disappears beneath something uglier and truer.
My breath comes hard. Paint slicks my wrists. Red beneath my nails. Black streaking my forearms. White across my fingers like ash.
I paint the fire.
I paint Strauss’s smile.
I paint my father’s voice being pulled from my head thread by thread.
I paint the pills too. Small white circles swallowed beneath layers of crimson until they disappear. Then I scratch them back through the wet paint with my fingernails because disappearing is exactly what they were designed to do.
I paint my mother reaching for me while I looked at her like a stranger.
The canvas becomes movement, fracture, blood, smoke, and teeth. It isn’t beautiful. It isn’t balanced. It isn’t therapeutic expression scheduled between breakfast and cognitive review.
It’s mine.
A sob tears loose, then another, and this time I don’t swallow them down for Nurse Larkin, Dr. Strauss, or the cameras recording every response they intend to turn into clinical evidence.
I cry loudly, messily, with paint on my face and broken glass on the floor, grieving every stolen morning, every grey canvas, every memory I thought had died because they buried it beneath drugs and called the grave recovery.
Matthias stands near the door, giving me space while watching the corridor.
Protecting the rage instead of interrupting it.
That makes me cry harder.
By the time my hands finally slow, the canvas looks like something clawed its way out of a burning room.
Maybe it did.
Maybe I did.
Sounds carry from somewhere down the hall.
Matthias turns his head.
I look at the painting, at the red and black and white screaming where grey used to be.
Then I pick up the brush again.
If Strauss wants evidence of resistance, I’ll give him a masterpiece.
Meridian Memory Institute, Rural Oregon. 1430 hours
Matthias doesn’t touch me until I stop throwing paint.
He stays near the door, close enough to block anyone who comes in, far enough away that the rage has room to move. He doesn’t reach for a syringe. He doesn’t call Nurse Larkin. He doesn’t use the voice Strauss uses, that soft, terrible tone meant to fold a person back into obedience.
He lets me break where I can be seen.
The storm doesn’t end cleanly. It comes apart in pieces, first in my hands, then my arms, then the thin shake running through my legs.
The brush slips from my fingers and lands in the red smear near my feet.
My breathing scrapes on the way in. My throat feels raw, and my hands are covered in color so thick I can’t see where my skin begins.
The canvas stands in front of me like evidence.
Red. Black. White. No grey left.
A burned room. A mouth open in a scream. A woman half-hidden inside the flames, clawing her own face back from the smoke.
I stare at it until my eyes sting.
Then Matthias speaks.
“There you are.”
The words don’t soften anything. They don’t need to.
I turn toward him slowly, exhausted enough to fall, furious enough to stand, and alive in a way this place tried to make impossible. Paint streaks my arms, my clothes, my throat. My hair has come loose around my face. I must look wild.
I feel wild.
I feel like myself for the first time in weeks.
Matthias is watching me with something that isn’t pity. That matters. Pity would make this smaller than it is. He looks at me like he knows the woman standing in front of him has just dragged herself out by the teeth.
“I remember,” I say.
His face stills.
I step over the broken glass carefully, though my legs aren’t sturdy.
“I remember Montreal. My mother. My father singing in bars with a silk cravat at his throat, even when everyone else was in shirtsleeves. I remember my studio. The fire. Strauss. The pills. Every time I felt something vanish and let them convince me it was healing.”
Matthias doesn’t interrupt. I look at him through tears and color.
“And I remember you.”
His breath leaves him slowly.
“Bliss.”
“The gallery,” I whisper. “You stood near the back wall because you didn’t want anyone to notice you. You wore a dark suit and those glasses, and you looked at my painting like you were having a conversation with it.”
“Bliss.”
“I painted you because you looked like grief had taught you how to be still.”
He closes his eyes briefly. When they open, the pain in them is real.
I take another unsteady step toward him.
“It’s all coming back,” I say. “Every piece they tried to bury.”
A door slams somewhere down the corridor.
Matthias turns at once, all restraint and purpose again.
But I don’t look away from him.
I’m done disappearing.
Meridian Memory Institute, Rural Oregon. 1445 hours
The silence after grief is almost louder than the grief itself.
Paint dries slowly around us. Red, black, and white dominate the canvas, but blue, yellow, and bruised violet break through in uneven ridges while broken glass catches the afternoon light near the far wall.
I sink onto the floor because my legs decide they’re finished before I do.
Matthias kneels beside me.
“Dizzy?”
“A little.”
He offers his hand. I take it without thinking.
He eases me down until I’m leaning against the wall, then sits beside me, leaving enough space that I could move away if I wanted to.
Instead, I close it. Not much. Just enough that my shoulder brushes his.
He doesn’t pull away. Neither do I.
“I remember my name,” I whisper.
His eyes stay on mine.
“I remember my Maman’s face. The smell of my studio. The taste of maple syrup on Sunday mornings.”
A smile touches his mouth.
“That’s... unexpectedly specific.”
“My father insisted pancakes weren’t complete without far too much maple syrup.”
“I’ll trust his expertise.”
A laugh escapes me.
Real. Untidy. Mine.
The sound surprises us both.
Emotion rushes back before I can enjoy it.
I turn toward him, and somehow the distance between us disappears completely.
My forehead rests against his shoulder.
He hesitates only long enough to make sure it’s my choice. Then his arms come around me.
He simply holds me, with a gentleness that asks nothing from me except to breathe. There is no urgency in him. No tightening that traps me. No hand steering my body where he wants it to go. If I leaned away, he would let me. I know it with absolute certainty.
That certainty is what lets me stay.
The way someone steadies a person who’s survived an earthquake and hasn’t yet realized the ground has stopped moving.
I breathe him in. Soap. Fresh cotton. The faint trace of coffee.
Something quietly, unmistakably him beneath all of it.
His heartbeat reaches me through his shirt, firm and relentless beneath my cheek. Mine answers it.
My fingers curl into the fabric at his back. I don’t mean to hold on so tightly. I don’t think he minds.
His hand moves slowly through my hair, smoothing it back from my face with infinite patience.
“Bliss.”
He says my name so gently it almost hurts.
I tilt my head enough to look at him.
He’s closer than he’s ever been.
Close enough that I can count the tiny lines at the corners of his eyes. Close enough that I remember painting this face years ago without ever imagining I’d one day know the man beneath it.
“I remember you,” I whisper.
“I know.”
“No.”
I shake my head.
“I remember what I felt before I forgot.”
Something flickers across his face. Hope. Fear. Longing.
All hidden almost as quickly as they appear.
My hand lifts of its own accord, resting lightly against his jaw.
His skin is warm beneath my palm, solid and real in a way nothing in this place has been.
His eyes close for the briefest second, and he leans into my touch before catching himself.
The movement is so small I almost miss it.
Almost.
My pulse stumbles. I know what I want.
The knowledge arrives whole, without hesitation or confusion.
I want to kiss him. Because every memory he’s given back has carried me here, to this impossible man who walked into Meridian carrying hope when I couldn’t remember how to hold any for myself.
I rise the smallest fraction. His breath catches.
The space between us disappears to almost nothing. Then he opens his eyes.
“Bliss.”
There’s longing in my name this time. And restraint.
His thumb brushes a streak of red paint from my cheek.
“If I kiss you now,” he says quietly, “I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering whether Meridian made that choice for you.”
The words stop me more effectively than any locked door.
My eyes burn again.
“You think I’d regret it.”
“I think you’ve only just become yourself again.”
He rests his forehead lightly against mine.
“I want every choice you make about me to belong entirely to you.”
I close my eyes. No one has ever protected my freedom quite like this.
Not even from himself.
I finally understand why I painted him.
Even before I knew his name, some part of me recognized the safest man in the room.
When he finally leans back, he doesn’t let go of my hand.
Outside, voices pass the door without stopping.
Inside, he keeps holding the line for both of us.
And somehow that makes me want him even more.
I remember everything now, including the exact shape of how much I want a man who refuses to take me until I’m free to give myself.
It might be the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.