The man at Leena’s door knew where she kept the spare key. He was holding it between two fingers, looking embarrassed.
“I thought this was my house,” he said.
He was younger than her husband had been, and considerably wetter. Rain ran from his sleeves onto the landing. Behind him stood a small girl carrying a broken umbrella.
“The company gave us your address,” he added. “About the recall.”
Leena had ignored the recall. After eight months of treatment, she could finally remember the last morning with Dev: his blue shirt, the burnt toast, his hand resting on her shoulder before he left for the station. She had no intention of letting a technician take it apart again.
The girl peered past her. “It’s smaller.”
“Nila.” The man drew her back. “Sorry.”
Leena let them in because of the child. She told herself that twice.
He introduced himself as Tomas and placed a folded invoice beside her fruit bowl. The same clinic. The same restoration date. The same memory reference number.
“There was a mix-up with the sensory records,” he said. “They said we should discuss it before the correction.”
Leena watched the girl examine the kitchen. “What do you remember?”
“Making breakfast. Somebody behind me. I was worried about missing a train.”
“A blue shirt?”
He nodded.
She sat down. Her chair scraped so loudly that Nila stopped moving.
The company had promised reconstruction, not invention. There had been forms explaining the difference. Leena had signed them while staring at a photograph of Dev. She remembered that perfectly.
“Whose morning was it?” she asked.
Tomas pulled the invoice toward himself. “Mine. My wife took Nila to her mother’s that day. We separated a week later.”
Outside, a bus pushed rain against the windows. Leena could still feel the remembered hand on her shoulder. It had always seemed slightly too heavy.
“I’m sorry,” Tomas said.
“You didn’t sell it to me.”
Nila was standing by the counter. “Dad, you didn’t burn the toast.”
“Please, love.”
“You didn’t. Mum did. You scraped it off with the red knife.”
Tomas looked at her.
“You said the black bits were pepper.” Nila grinned, waiting for him to remember the joke.
Leena had no red knife. In the memory, the knife was red.
Her phone rang. The clinic’s name filled the screen. She turned it over.
“Do you want them to remove it?” Tomas asked.
Leena wanted Dev to have said goodbye. She wanted it so badly that a stranger’s failed marriage had become the happiest thing in her apartment.
“Yes,” she said, and then, because it was harder, “But not today.”
Tomas nodded. There was no relief in his face, only recognition.
She put bread in the toaster. Nila requested no pepper. Tomas laughed once and covered his mouth.
When the toast came up, Leena put it on three plates. Later she would have to remember this morning without assistance. She noticed the water beneath Tomas’s shoes, the uneven legs of the little stool, the girl licking butter from her thumb.
She did not try to make any of it happier than it was.