“And what would it prove?” I asked. “You wouldn’t ask unless you thought it proved something, and we needed that proof.” He didn’t answer then, and that should have been answer enough. “Would it prove that I’m not a Mem after all? That I am my own?”

“Yes!”

“I am proving that now, right this moment, by saying no. Yes, I belong to someone, to Dolores, technically, but it doesn’t matter. It never has.”

“It has always mattered, petite.” Where I had spoken emphatically, he was suddenly calm. Or quiet, at least. “It’s why you cannot come and go as you please, why you’ve never lived anywhere but Montreal—”

“I’ve never wanted to.”

“Things change, Dolores. People, too. It’s part of being alive.” He waited a long while, watched me almost without blinking. “Please.”

“I’m sorry.” And he deflated. “I don’t believe in it. I know it’s your life’s work, Professor, but I don’t agree with the practice of extraction. That’s the truth. What kind of people are we if we can’t traverse the landscape of our own memories? What kind of people do they become who refuse?”

“It’s one procedure.”

“So was hers.”

He closed his eyes, and I waited until the sound of Camille singing put him at ease.

“And I know the length would be different and you don’t think there’d be so great a risk, but I don’t care. I’d lose something either way.”

Looking back, he may not have been listening anymore. He knew much more than I did by then.

“Maybe she regained her composure and the extraction seemed worthwhile, but maybe Dolores never had another chance to experience what I did, staring at that broken widow and man. Maybe instead of making her stronger, it weakened her. Maybe she couldn’t cope with anything that happened after,” I said, because I didn’t yet know that I’d been the catalyst for her second extraction.

He might’ve told me then what Dolores had become, but he didn’t. Instead he accepted my refusal with what in hindsight could only be a father’s magnanimous humility. The bittersweet confliction of pride in the child’s ability to reason for herself and pain in the knowledge that she will fail. That I would never be a real girl, and he was helpless to change that.

“I don’t want to be like Walter,” I said, foolish enough to think his silence empty. I at least had the good sense to speak the next part gently. “I don’t want to be like any of them.”

He nodded then, his eyes on our hands, the sound of Camille’s voice drifting ahead of her before she jovially reentered the dining room and, with a curtsy, presented us with the evening’s coffee.