The drawer was locked and the key returned to the bottom of the humidor.

“I couldn’t let her fade away,” he said of his wife. “When I lost hope that she could live with the loss, I began to wonder whether she could forget, whether I could help her to.”

From there, I knew the rest. The wonderings of a brilliant man had already yielded so great a number of impossible feats, to the good of friends and strangers alike. The Professor had set to work devising a way to spare his wife the memory of her child. And the fact that I was there, listening to the story, meant he had succeeded.

“Where are her Mems?”

A spitting sound crowded the end of my query and his shoulders quaked. To account for the quantity of his sudden tears I thought the Professor would have needed another pair of eyes. It was a heart-wrenching scene. By 1923 I’d lived in the outside world for a number of years and had begun to feel more than my own emotions. I found myself empathizing with characters on film even though I well knew they weren’t real people, and the Professor meant so much more than they did. I’d come to love him in place of the father who didn’t rightfully belong to any Dolores but the Source—and whose convictions meant only one Dolores could ever be his daughter. I adored him in place of the first Banker Parrish, who may have loved me back but, once I was released, seemed content enough with the memory of me. At the sight of the Professor’s uncharacteristic unraveling, I rushed to his side, wrapping my arms about him. That my question had incited such an outburst only concerned me more.

“That, I could not bear,” he said when he could speak, his arms around my waist as I swayed us both. “It was the worst of Camille, the darkest bit of despair.”

“There was only one?”

“Only one procedure, ma petite, you must understand. I took all of the pregnancy in one extraction. Everything, and everything it touched. Pieces of us, of conversations and parties. Times I would like to have kept. I had to be sure she’d be completely free.”

I couldn’t speak, the weight and breadth of what he described becoming increasingly clear. By all rights, there should have been hundreds of Mems, thousands perhaps, to account for every moment or event that Camille had experienced during pregnancy. In some ways, it must have been easier to take what amounted to nearly a year of her life than to individually find them all.

“It wasn’t enough for Camille to forget,” I said when the second realization overwhelmed me. “What about her friends and family, surely they would have known?”