“Yeah, but I’ve probably read as much about memory as you have, and fabricated memories can be extremely rich in detail. It doesn’t make them real.” Hope had told Melissa during their last session that even though she was beginning to recall moments from her childhood, she wasn’t certain the events had actually taken place. But the knife incident? Oh, it had definitely been real, all the way down to the dish towel that Hope had bought for her elephant-loving mother, only to watch it grow dirtier and dirtier, until it was stiff and stank of mildew.

Melissa crossed her arms. “Of course, you know there’s one way you might be able to confirm the accuracy of these flashbacks.”

Her mother’s court file. The trial transcript. The photographs of Hope’s injuries. It remained to be seen if the stenographer captured the continual interruptions in the victim’s testimony as she repeatedly broke down in tears, but Hope remembered every excruciating moment of her three hours on the stand, knowing that she was sealing her mother’s fate, but also knowing it was the only hope she had of surviving.

“I’m just not ready for that. Not yet.” A few more weeks of therapy would do it, though. More cracks would appear in the metaphorical dam in her mind until the whole barrier collapsed. It would be her breakthrough moment. She’d fly to Wichita, finally prepared to scour the court files that would confirm the authenticity of her “recovered” memories. She would be, as she said, one integrated person with a past, present, and future. By the time she started classes at Stonybrook in the fall, the lying—most of it, anyway—could stop. She’d no longer be the girl without a memory.

At least she wasn’t a total liar. Hope really did suffer from amnesia: actual, blackout, zero-memory amnesia from the moment she ate those stupid mushrooms with TC until she woke up the next morning.

Her wrist. That was how all of this started—when Lindsay’s father took them to the shooting range last winter. The doctors in Hopewell naturally assumed that the lingering weakness in her left wrist was from the injuries sustained in the accident, but Hope had one of her mother’s many arm-yanks to thank for that. The gun Jimmy handed to her at the range was only a nine-millimeter. He said he picked it because her hands were too small for most of the other options.