9. Three Years Ago
Three Years Ago
Matthias
The portrait lies between us on Bliss’s bed, surrounded by stolen color.
I should be focused on clinical markers. Reduced latency. Improved recall association. Successful sensory reintroduction. Evidence that the counter-treatment is working faster than I dared hope.
Instead, I’m staring at my own face rendered by a woman who shouldn’t remember painting me once, let alone twice.
Three years ago, I was in Montreal for a conference on trauma memory and neuroplasticity. I remember the lecture hall, the hotel carpet, the weak coffee, and the colleague who insisted I needed to see something beautiful before I became entirely impossible to invite anywhere.
So I went to the gallery.
I expected wine, polite conversation, and people saying brave things about paintings they planned to discuss later over dinner.
Then I saw Bliss Fontaine’s work.
The main canvas dominated the far wall, almost six feet across, a crowd scene built from color, movement, and emotion rather than strict likeness. Faces emerged and vanished inside it, some sharp, some blurred, all caught in the strange intimacy of strangers occupying the same room.
It should have been chaotic. It wasn’t. It was alive.
I stood in front of that painting for longer than was socially reasonable, aware of people moving around me and unable to join them.
The work seemed to understand something I’d spent years trying to measure in laboratories and explain in articles.
Memory is never only what happened. It is color, proximity, light, sound, and the emotional truth the body keeps long after language fails.
Then I found myself inside it.
Not centered. Not flattered. Not made important.
Simply seen.
A man near the edge of the crowd, dark skin warmed by gold light, glasses low on his nose, expression quieter than the movement around him. I remember the discomfort of recognition, not because the likeness was perfect, but because the attention was.
She had painted me as if she’d understood my stillness.
I bought it before I left the gallery. No hesitation. No sensible conversation with myself about cost, shipping, or the absurdity of purchasing a painting by a woman I’d never met because her work had reached somewhere I preferred to keep sealed.
It hangs in my study in Cape Town.
Or it did, before I stopped going home long enough for rooms to matter.
Bliss watches my face now, the hidden drawings spread between us, her eyes clearer than yesterday and still too vulnerable for every truth I want to give her.
“I bought the crowd painting from your Montreal exhibition,” I say.
Her gaze lifts quickly. “You did?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Because I was lonely. Because your painting saw me. Because for ten minutes in a Montreal gallery, I remembered that beauty could still find me after grief had made me difficult to reach.
I choose the answer she can safely hold.
“Because it was extraordinary.”
Her fingers rest near the portrait, not touching it. “Was I there?”
“Yes,” I say. “You were laughing with your mother.”
Something flickers in her eyes.
“Maman.”
The word is soft and aching.
I keep my hands still, though everything in me wants to reach for her.
“Yes,” I say. “She was very proud of you.”
Bliss looks down at the portrait again.
“I think I was proud too.”
The sentence nearly breaks me.
I swallow it down and reach for my notebook instead.
“Then we start there.”
Meridian Memory Institute, Rural Oregon. 1000 hours
Bliss keeps looking at the portrait, her fingers curled around the edge of the paper.
“You bought it because it was extraordinary,” she says.
“Yes.”
“That isn’t the whole answer.”
“No,” I say. “It’s the safest version of one.”
She studies me with a focus that would have made Strauss reach for his pen.
He would call this fixation or transference or some neat clinical term that makes a woman’s instincts sound like a symptom.
I know better. Bliss is thinking. Comparing.
Testing the shape of truth against the fog still clinging to the edges of her mind.
So I give her more.
“Three years ago, I went to your show while I was in Montreal.” My mouth shifts despite the risk of the memory. “I nearly didn’t. I’m glad I did.”
Her gaze drops to my hands. “I had a show.”
“You had a show.”
“With people.”
“A great many people. Too many coats. Too much wine. Terrible canapés.”
A faint line appears between her brows. “The goat’s cheese ones were dry.”
I go very still, but only inside. Outside, I keep my voice even. “Yes.”
Her eyes lift to mine.
There she is.
The fog hasn’t lifted completely, yet I can finally see her through it.
“I remember that?” she whispers.
“You remembered something specific. That matters.”
She looks away quickly, as if the memory might be taken back if she stares at it too directly. “Tell me the rest.”
“You painted a crowd,” I say. “Large canvas. Movement everywhere. Faces layered so closely they seemed to move in a single current. Most people were blurred by color, but a few were sharp. You made strangers look as if they’d been caught thinking something they didn’t mean to show.”
“And you were one of them.”
“Yes.”
“Across a room.”
I nod. “Across a room.”
Her thumb moves over the edge of the paper, careful not to smear the charcoal. “I painted you before we met.”
“You saw something before we met.”
“What did I see?”
I could answer too much. Loneliness. Recognition.
A man carrying grief through a room full of people pretending art was only decoration.
But this recovery can’t become me handing her conclusions.
Her mind has been invaded by men who told her what her own memories meant. I won’t add my voice to theirs.
So I say, “You tell me.”
Her eyes stay on the drawing. The silence between us holds a fragile shape.
Then she looks at me, and her voice is quieter. “You looked like someone listening for a voice no one else could hear.”
Thandiwe’s name sits on the edge of my tongue.
I don’t say it. Not here. Not yet.
Bliss exhales shakily and touches the sketched line of my glasses. “And you looked back at my painting every morning?”
“In my study.”
“For three years?”
“Yes.”
Her mouth trembles, not quite a smile, not quite pain. “That sounds either romantic or deeply worrying.”
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it. Soft. Careful. Real.
“Both are possible.”
For the first time since I entered this facility, she almost smiles like the woman who painted fire.
Then footsteps approach in the corridor, and she turns the drawings over with a speed that tells me Bliss Fontaine is far more present than Strauss realizes.
Meridian Memory Institute, Rural Oregon. 1015 hours
The footsteps fade again.
Bliss keeps looking at me.
Not politely or with curiosity. The way artists look at people when they’re trying to understand what lives beneath the face.
“You were different in the painting,” she says.
“How?”
“Less careful.”
A smile almost reaches my mouth.
“Art has a habit of ignoring the version of ourselves we present to the world.”
She studies me a little longer, her gaze moving over my face with a patience that makes it difficult to hide anything.
“I saw someone who was looking for something he’d lost.”
The words settle quietly between us.
Then she asks, “Was that true?”
There are questions I can avoid.
This isn’t one of them.
“Yes.”
“What was it?”
“My sister.”
She doesn’t speak.
“Her name was Thandiwe.”
The name carries Cape Town with it. Home. Laughter. Every memory Meridian failed to take from me.
“She was taken by the same people who turned your treatment into captivity.”
Bliss’s fingers tighten around the edge of the paper.
“The same people?”
“Yes.”
“How long ago?”
“Ten years.”
Her eyes search mine again, as though she’s painting me all over.
“Did you find her?”
I hold her gaze.
“No.”
The answer lingers between us.
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
She looks down at the sketch hidden beneath the worksheet.
“Is that why you’re here?”
“Yes.”
“To find them?”
“To stop them.”
“And to stop this.”
I glance around the white room, at the blank clock, the locked paint cabinet, the careful absence of anything bright enough to wake her.
“The drugs. The conditioning. Everything they’ve done to your mind.”
Her voice is barely above a whisper.
“Can you undo it?”
“You’re already doing it.”
“I don’t feel like I am.”
“You remembered an art show from three years ago. You remembered painting a stranger in a crowd. You remembered enough to draw my face.”
Her gaze stays on the sketch.
“I still don’t know why I painted you.”
“No.”
“But I saw something.”
“You did.”
“What was it?”
I shake my head gently.
“That part has to come from you.”
Her shoulders draw in slightly, but she doesn’t withdraw. The fog is still there, threaded through her words and pauses, but something stronger is moving beneath it now. Not certainty. Recognition. The part of her Meridian hasn’t managed to reach.
“I hate that,” she says.
“I know.”
“I want you to tell me.”
“If I tell you, Strauss can use it against you.”
Her eyes snap back to mine.
“He’d twist it?”
“He’d make you doubt it. He’d call it suggestion, dependence, treatment resistance, anything that serves his version of your recovery.”
Her mouth tightens. “He does like his words.”
“He does.”
“They’re ugly words dressed as clean ones.”
“Yes.”
She nods slowly, accepting the answer because she understands ugliness hidden inside polish. Then her fingertips hover over the drawing.
“I painted the man who lost his sister.”
“Yes.”
“And now you’re helping me find myself.”
“Yes.”
Her eyes lift to mine.
“Then don’t give up on me.”
“I won’t.”
Meridian Memory Institute, Rural Oregon. 1030 hours
The silence between us changes.
Not into certainty.
Into recognition.
The kind that arrives before trust has enough proof to justify itself.
Until a few minutes ago, we were strangers connected by a painting. Now Meridian sits between us, having stolen ten years from me and six weeks from her, leaving us on opposite sides of the same wound.
Bliss looks down at the sketch again.
“I drew you from a memory they tried to erase.”
“Yes.”
“And you came here because you understood what they were doing to me.”
“I came because your mother asked for help. I stayed because I understood.”
Her fingers smooth the edge of the paper, careful and slow.
“Because of Thandiwe.”
“Yes.”
“And because of the painting?”
I hold her gaze.
“Yes.”
She lets out a small breath.
“That sounds impossible.”
“It felt impossible.”
Too many things press against the edges of the conversation. Chance. Fate. Coincidence. None of those words satisfy me.
For years I chased the people who destroyed my sister’s life.
I walked into an art gallery because a colleague insisted I needed one evening away from research.
A woman I’d never met looked across a crowded room and put my face inside her work.
Three years later, I found her inside a Meridian facility, fighting to remember who she was.
They say we're all only six degrees of separation from one another.
Perhaps.
But statistics don’t explain that.
Neither does neuroscience.
Bliss reaches toward me before I realize she’s moving.
Her fingertips brush lightly against my jaw.
Curious.
Careful.
The touch of an artist confirming what memory has already begun sketching.
Every instinct tells me to step back.
Instead, before I can stop myself, I lean almost imperceptibly into her palm.
Warm skin.
Paint-stained fingers.
My breath catches.
Her eyes widen just enough for me to know she felt it too.
We’re suddenly close enough that I can see the tiny flecks of green hidden inside the grey of her irises. Close enough to feel her breathing. Close enough that another inch would erase every boundary I’ve spent the last hour protecting.
I want that inch.
God help me, I want it.
Not because she’s vulnerable, but because she’s Bliss.
Because she saw me years before we met.
Because somewhere beneath the drugs and stolen memories, she’s finding her way back to herself, and every part of me wants to meet the woman waiting there.
Voices echo in the corridor.
The sound shatters whatever fragile gravity has gathered between us.
I step back immediately.
So does she.
Her hand falls away, and the absence of it is almost physical.
We’re both quiet until she finally looks at me.
“I almost remembered something.”
“You did.”
She shakes her head.
“No. Something else.”
I know exactly what she means.
I force myself to hold the line.
“When you’re out,” I say quietly. “When your choices are your own.”
She searches my face for a long moment before giving the smallest nod.
“I’ll remember that.”
“So will I.”
The voices pass our door without stopping.
We never kissed.
We came close enough that the space between us now feels like another thing Meridian stole.
For now.