The rhythm of written commands and brave morning hand-holds became our new normal for several weeks. Each day was a small victory, another stone laid on the path of Sina's self-continuity. She was building a persona, a character named "the girl who takes his hand," and learning to inhabit it every single day. She was becoming the hero of her own story.
But I knew, and she knew, that there was still a vault at the heart of our world. A locked room full of ghosts. The archives. My video diary. The raw, unfiltered truth of the eighty days before our "honest" beginning.
She had been avoiding it. Dr. Thorne had made the files available to her, but had advised her to wait until she felt ready, and for weeks, the folder had remained an unopened icon on her desktop. It represented a truth her heart wasn't ready to reconcile with her actions.
The catalyst came from an unexpected place: Kaito.
During a study session, the topic of a school film festival came up.
"I am entering a submission," Kaito announced, with the same enthusiasm he might use to announce a dental cleaning. "It is a short documentary on the migratory patterns of local bird species. The narrative structure is based on the principles of chronological data presentation."
Maya clapped her hands. "Ooh, a movie! That's so exciting, Kaito! Will it have a soundtrack?"
"Music is an unnecessary emotional manipulation," Kaito stated flatly.
The conversation flowed around this, but I noticed Sina had gone very still. Her pencil had stopped moving. Her gaze was distant. The word documentary and Kaito's phrase chronological data presentation had clearly struck a chord.
Later, as we were walking towards the bridge for our usual afternoon quiet time, she was unusually quiet. She wasn't sketching. She was just thinking.
"A chronological presentation of data," she finally said, her voice soft and thoughtful. "That's what your archives are, aren't they? It's not just... moments. It's a timeline. The whole story."
I stopped walking. My heart began to beat a little faster. "Yeah," I said cautiously. "I guess it is."
"I've been avoiding it," she admitted, her gaze fixed on the familiar railing of the bridge ahead. "I've been getting to know the ghosts of my past selves one drawing at a time. It's... gentler that way. Safer." She clutched her sketchbook tighter. "But it's not the whole story. I'm only seeing the brave moments. The happy endings of each day."
She looked at me, and her eyes were filled with a new, sober understanding. "I haven't seen the mornings. I haven't seen the goodbyes. I haven't seen… the days it didn't work. The days you almost gave up."
I had never told her about those days. The "sad-boy island" days, as Zeke called them. The mornings where the pain had been too much. But somehow, she knew they must have existed.
"I've been piecing together a version of myself based on the evidence," she continued, her voice gaining the same determined edge it had the day she'd written her first note. "And I've been piecing together a version of you. The patient, perfect, romantic boy who waited for me every single sunrise. But that's not the whole story either, is it?"
"No," I admitted, my voice a whisper.
"I think..." she took a deep breath, her decision solidifying as she spoke. "I think I need to see the data. All of it. From the beginning. I need to understand the whole truth. Not just the happy sketches. The entire, messy, painful, chronological truth." She looked at the bridge. "I can't keep learning about my past from a boy I can't remember meeting. I need to see it for myself."
It was the bravest thing she had ever said. It was a conscious choice to walk into the fire, to face the full, unedited weight of the life she had been denied.
That night, there was no sketching. There was no quiet talk. The air was charged with a new, nervous energy. I walked with her back to her apartment. Sora met us at the door, her expression already knowing. Sina must have texted her.
The three of us went to Sina's room. It was the first time I had ever been inside. It was neat, simple, and her personality was everywhere. The walls were covered in her sketches, a beautiful, chaotic collage of our shared days. The little blue bear, Agent Blue, sat on her pillow.
She sat at her desk, her back ramrod straight. Sora stood behind her, a hand on her shoulder. I stood in the doorway, feeling like an intruder at a sacred event.
"Okay," Sina whispered, more to herself than to us.
Her hand trembled as she moved the mouse. She navigated to the folder. The Archives. She clicked on it.
The list of files populated the screen. Day 1 - Color in a Grey World. Day 2 - The Tourist. All the way down.
Her finger hovered over the first file. She took a sharp breath and then, before she could lose her nerve, she double-clicked.
My own younger, wonder-struck face filled the screen.
"Her name is Sina. She has this laugh. It's like... color..."
Sina watched, her face impassive, a stone wall against the wave of emotion she was about to face. When the clip ended, she didn't pause. She immediately clicked on Day 2.
She watched five clips in a row, a silent, thirty-minute block of forgotten laughter and awkward introductions. Then she paused the video for Day 5.
"This feels… clinical," she said, her voice flat. "Like I'm a scientist studying a specimen."
"You are," I said from the doorway. "And the specimen is you."
She nodded slowly, then resumed the videos.
We spent two hours in that room. Two hours of chronological data. She watched herself laugh, and stumble, and be brilliant, and be clumsy. She watched me orchestrate insane plans with Zeke, and she saw the genuine, unscripted moments of connection that made them all worthwhile.
But then we got to the videos I had almost forgotten. The end-of-day confessionals where I was not the confident romantic hero.
She watched the video from the end of a rainy day where a "first date" had been a complete disaster, ending with my recorded voice whispering, "I don't know if I can do this. It hurts too much."
She saw the raw footage from the morning of Day 80, the camera shaking in my hand as I filmed her from across the courtyard, watching her look for a boy who wasn't there, the agony clear on my recorded face.
She wasn't just watching her own lost happiness anymore. She was watching my hidden pain. The cost of it all. The days I had faltered. The burden I had carried.
When she finally paused, we were on Day 84. The night of the confession. She turned around in her chair, and her face was awash with tears. The clinical observer was gone, replaced by a girl who was drowning in a sea of rediscovered emotion.
She looked at me, at the boy from the screen, the one who had felt all this pain for her, because of her.
"You absolute idiot," she whispered, the words a sob, but not an accusation. They were words of profound, heartbroken empathy. "You incredible, perfect, absolute idiot."
She stood up from her desk, crossed the room in two steps, and wrapped her arms around my waist, burying her face in my chest, and held on as if she was afraid I, too, would disappear by morning. The archives were open. The ghosts were free. And for the first time, we were mourning them together.