My eyes wandered to the neighboring plaques as I formulated my next question for her. The one to the left of Louis' read Marco Parcalus 1630-1657, the one to the right on the bottom row read Colleen Korin McGregor 1723-1761. I started to see the pattern in the dates and stood straight up to look at the ones above. Nez-Lah 1506-1524, Bando 1524-1540, and Bahram Al-Malick 1540-1630 looked back at me from left to right. The cane clicked on the stone floor as I turned to look the plaques on the other wall. Diana Marie Duggan 1761-1824 was on the top row on the left and Dr. Hans M. Roder 1824-1889 was in the middle. Graciela still shined in the sunlight on the right. The three plaques below were all blank.

My eyes defocused as I thought about my own timeline, three lives uninterrupted from 1892 till now. It all began to make sense: the enamel basin, the crude crutch, the McTaggart, and the cane. I ran my hand over the warm brass of Graciela's monument as fragmented thoughts coalesced in my head. She would have been three years older than Vasili. I turned and looked at Poppy. She was staring at me again, but I had expected it this time. "I think I understand," I said, my voice almost cracking.

"I think you understand too," she said. Her facial expression was a blank slate as she continued. "You're like me, aren't you?"

I nodded after several unblinking moments. I was too stunned to speak. 'You're like me aren't you?' The words echoed in my head, echoed in the vacuum where my reality had been seconds before. 'You're like me.' I never thought I'd be like anybody, I mean I never thought there would be anyone like me.

She uncorked the bottle and filled the glasses. "Here," she said patting her hand on the bench, "sit down and have some wine."

Sitting down, I held the wine glass with two hands to keep it from shaking. I drank half the glass but it was little help for my dry mouth. "I don't know what to say," I said placing the glass down on the bench, again using both hands.

"It's alright Evan, I understand what you're feeling. I've been in your position before. Take your time, we have plenty of supplies," she said opening the basket.

I remained motionless and must have seemed catatonic on the outside. But inside, I was a turmoil of activity. I felt nervous about confiding in anyone after all these years and yet joyful about the possibility that this could be true. I was anxious to find out more if this was true and I felt uneasy about a new reality in which I would no longer be unique. 'You're like me.' In the past three years, I'd often fantasized about finding someone else like me, someone else who remembered.