No Diagnosis

Lena met him offsite because Elias no longer trusted clinical rooms and Lena no longer trusted Morrow's meeting logs. They chose a coffee shop beside the railway station at four in the afternoon. Commuters passed behind the glass carrying bags and folded umbrellas. Elias sat facing the entrance. Lena noticed and chose the chair opposite without commenting.

"Mara was never diagnosed with psychosis," Lena said after he asked the question directly. "She was never diagnosed with bipolar disorder, delusional disorder or any condition that would explain away her complaints about the research."

"Her police file says she had a history of emotional instability."

"That phrase came from a clinical summary written after she left Fallow."

"By whom?"

"Dr. Pritchard signed it."

"You worked under him."

"Yes."

"Did you agree?"

"No."

"Did you object?"

Lena looked at the coffee she had not touched. "Not loudly enough." Elias felt anger, then exhaustion. "Why did Mara say people would tell us she was sick?"

"Because Pritchard had already begun reframing her objections as symptoms. She was anxious, sleeping badly, hypervigilant and keeping obsessive records. All of those things were true. The error was treating the truth of those symptoms as proof that the object of her fear was imaginary."

"She was scared because something was happening, and the fear became evidence that nothing was happening."

"Yes."

A train announcement sounded overhead. Lena waited until it ended.

"There was another problem," she said. "Mara had become very good at detecting changes in her own recollections. Too good, perhaps. She recorded pre-session accounts, then compared them with later reports. But once you start watching memory that closely, normal variation becomes frightening. She could no longer tell which changes came from treatment and which came from being human."

Elias understood that immediately.

The yellow coat. Red coat. Boat. No boat.

"She stopped trusting herself."

"Yes."

"Like me."

Lena did not deny it. Elias looked through the window at the station platforms. "Did she ever come back?"

"To Fallow? No."

"To Dunley?"

Lena's face became guarded.

"Third-party identity protection," Elias said.

"Don't make that sound absurd."

"It is absurd when the third party is my sister."

"She is not an extension of you."

The sentence cut deeper than he expected. Lena saw it. "That came out harder than I meant."

"Was it wrong?"

"No."

They sat quietly for a while. A little girl at the next table was drawing on a paper napkin while her father looked at his phone. She drew a house, crossed it out, then drew another house beside it. Elias watched the second become larger than the first.

"Why did I volunteer in 2018?" he asked.

"You were trying to protect something."

"Mara."

"I can't answer that."

"You don't need to."

Lena's eyes lifted to his.

"I found a photograph at Pember," Elias said. "Me. You. A woman who may be Mara. Jonah had it. He said I made him promise not to tell me whether she was alive unless I remembered why."

Lena closed her eyes briefly.

"You contacted Jonah."

"He contacted my common sense. It didn't work."

She almost smiled.

"Was it Mara?"

"I am not answering from a photograph you haven't verified."

"You know."

"Yes."

There it was.

The word settled between them.

Elias's hands became cold.

"She's alive."

Lena did not speak.

"Or she was in 2018."

Still nothing.

He looked away because her silence had become too loud in his head. For fifteen years he had lived inside the absence of a body. He had imagined rivers, fields, locked rooms, unmarked graves. He had learned how long certain evidence survived outdoors. He knew missing-person recovery statistics by age and circumstance. Hope had gradually become something he considered intellectually embarrassing.

Now a woman across from him could end it with one sentence and would not.

"I hate you," he said.

Lena nodded.

That made him angrier.

"Don't accept it like a diagnosis."

"I'm not."

"Say something."

"I am trying to decide which cruelty belongs to me and which one you asked me to keep."

Elias stared at her.

"Then make a decision."

Lena finally took a sip of coffee. It had gone cold.

"In 2018," she said, "you knew more about Mara than you know now."

Elias waited.

"And you chose not to keep all of it."