I’d told no one that she’d ever spoken to me, the hurt having been too devastating to share. My first Banker gave me the family address, though he didn’t think the correspondence wise. He’d seen the way Dolores’s father ignored me the day we watched Laurence Lesh glide and warned that my mother might do the same. But I knew better.

It is indeed remarkable that you recall Dolores’s memories, she’d written after receiving my letter in 1909. In it I’d recounted my earliest and favorite memories of us in sometimes painstaking detail. The portrait she and I had taken the year of my debut and the time it had taken her to perfect my hair. She and I at a piano and voice recital, performing together for the first of many times. The color and the fabric of her favorite dressing gown. The way it felt when it brushed against my face, and the way that I still missed it.

I told her how I lived on my own now, in an apartment by myself where there was always space to visit.

I want to be grateful to have received your letter, she wrote. But I am not.

You are as remarkable as Dr. Parrish told us, years ago, and I’ll confess that I very nearly forgot what you are. Because I am at once proud of you and everything you have accomplished and am also disturbed by the way you speak of me and of us.

I tried reading the letter aloud so that I wouldn’t hear her voice in my head, so that perhaps I would stop imagining her in the dress she’d worn for brunch the day I was extracted.

My daughter, you see, is in the next room as I write this. My Dolores, of which I have but one. If I say that you belong to me, what does that say of her? If I say that you are full of life and intellect, is she not? And so you’ll understand why I can’t write again and why I’d ask that you don’t either.

I am mother of one daughter.

You are not Dolores, and I cannot love a Mem.

In the stripped and sterile dormitory, I might have stumbled back if my legs would allow it. Instead I found myself returned from the past, standing before Harvey, as close as he’d drawn me, and swaying between wishing I’d kept my distance and refusing to take the blame again.

“Is this another of your experiments, Mr. Parrish?” I asked at last. “Testing whether something like me can break? My heart is not imaginary, Doctor. And you are not kind.”

His dark, thick eyebrows ribboned handsomely but he remained silent.

“You’ve said it now. The least you could do is look away.”