I had the sense something important had just taken place, and I looked at Cole’s face for a clue, but it was pleasant and impassive again. It was as if I’d just seen a flash of his desire, what it was he wanted from us. The story. The lie. It didn’t make any sense.

That week Cole walked me to work in the mornings. He began to meet me for lunch. He accompanied me to the post office, the bank. Everyone stared at him.

When I introduced him, he told an increasingly detailed story of how we met freshman year. “There was a train somewhere near campus,” he told my boss in the Ferry-All offices. “And we could hear it from the dorm. Do you remember that, Lydia? The whistle of the train? And all the crows in the fall? The sky black with crows.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t remember that.”

“It slips away from you, doesn’t it?” he said. “Memory.”

Here’s what I realized that day. Memories were of special interest to him. He collected them, studied them, as if the thing he wanted from us was our memories, as if memories could make a man rich.

But I couldn’t tell if he was trying to take memories away from us or offer them to us.

The memories of train whistles and crows, the history class in college—maybe that was his way of being generous, offering me a gift in his favorite currency. But I wasn’t sure I wanted this gift. I only had a few memories from that semester in Providence, and now they blurred, ran together with Cole’s fabrications. Now, when I thought back to my dorm room that fall ten years ago, I heard the train. I saw the shadows of crows.

When we were eight, my mother took us to watch The Wizard of Oz at the little cinema inland. During the Munchkins’ song, she leaned down and said something in my ear.

“What did you say?” I asked her.

“This is the part you’re going to remember,” she repeated. Even then I felt resentful. I would choose my own memories, thank you. But the funny thing is that that was the part I remembered, for years. It haunted me and I wondered if she had somehow, powerfully, created the memory, or if she were simply prophetic.