“We discussed this. That’s called selective retention. It’s a perfectly normal coping mechanism of someone with dissociative personality disorder brought on by trauma. Your brain is simply not willing to process memories it might find uncomfortable, so it ignores them.”

“Yeah. Like what th—” I stop. Things that I might find uncomfortable. Bad things, obviously. “I want to remember it all. So I can…” Solve the mystery of his death? He’s begging me from the grave to do so! Nice try, Sherlock. I shrug. “So I can understand why. I think if I know why, I’ll be able to move on.”

She pulls out her file and starts to read back a few pages. “It says here you did know why. You thought it was stress.”

“I don’t believe that anymore. Maybe that’s what bothered me. It never seemed right. He was excited about college, not stressed. And he…he was really religious. I mean, don’t suicides go to Hell in Catholicism? He totally believed all that. He never would’ve done it. Never, even if he was under stress.”

She rereads the file, nodding. “You said a few sessions ago that you never saw any signs at all. He wasn’t sad. Didn’t give away belongings. Didn’t cut off friends or family.”

“Exactly. None of that. He was totally happy.”

“Sometimes people can put on very good masks, though.”

“Not Declan. Not around me,” I say shortly, giving her a scowl. “He had no reason to hide anything from me, and I never thought, even once, that’s what he was doing.”

“But…you say you don’t remember a lot of details. Is it possible you might be—”

“No.” I say it with such force that I surprise myself.

She makes more notes. I can tell she’s doubtful. “Why don’t you tell me about the last time you saw him.”

I nod, but very little comes to me. I remember being at his house. I remember the snowstorm was coming and he’d had to get gas. I remember waiting for him to get back. And then… “I don’t know. It’s hard to… I can’t. It was all very normal, though. He wasn’t upset. I’m sure of it.”

Juliet likes to think she knows Declan. But what I’ve shared over a thousand hours of therapy can’t paint a full picture of him. Declan may have had only one mode—happy—but it was of a thousand different colors, like a rainbow, each hue different and beautiful in its own way.

“What was that you said, about a picture?” she asks.

I blink. Hadn’t I already explained it to her? “Oh. Yeah. It was shady. It felt like, I don’t know, something that couldn’t have belonged to Declan. It was a picture of bodies, too blown up to see everything, and it said, THIS ENDS HERE.”