Maren walked for three hours.
She left the Sollen building at 11:40 a.m. and turned left, which would have taken her toward the Red Line and home, and then she kept walking. Past the station. Past the convention center with its glass façade reflecting a sky the color of dishwater. Past the ICA, where a banner advertised an exhibition she would not see. Along the harborwalk, where the wind came off the water with the cold, salt, diesel breath of a city that had been exhaling the same air for four hundred years.
She walked without destination. This was unusual for Maren. She did not take walks. She took routes from A to B, optimized for time, planned in advance, logged on her phone's health app not out of interest in fitness but out of a compulsive need to document movement, to establish that she had been in places, at times, doing things. Evidence. Breadcrumbs. The paper trail of a life that could be verified.
Except now she wasn't sure it could.
She walked along the harbor and played a game she'd invented in the stairwell and already hated. She called it triage. The rules were simple: take a memory. Any memory. Examine it. Ask: is this real?
The beluga whale at the aquarium. Not real. Confirmed false. The first casualty, the one that had broken the seal.
Thanksgiving dinner at David's parents' house, seventeen months ago. Turkey. Cranberry sauce tart, homemade, with orange zest. David's mother complaining about the oven temperature. Alma asleep on the couch after dessert, one shoe off, gravy on her collar.
Maren could taste the cranberry sauce. She could feel the texture of the couch cushion under Alma's sleeping head. She could hear David's mother's voice this oven has never been right, not once, not in twenty-two years with the rhythmic complaint of a woman who argued with appliances the way other people argued with God.
She called David.
"Two calls in one week," he said. "Should I be worried?"
"Thanksgiving. Last year. Your parents' house."
"We didn't go to my parents' for Thanksgiving last year. Mom was in the hospital remember? The hip replacement. We did Thanksgiving here, just me and Alma. You had Alma for Christmas instead."
Maren stopped walking. She was standing near a bench overlooking the harbor. A woman was jogging past with a dog, and the dog's leash jingled with each stride, a small, insistent bell.
"You're sure."
"Maren, I'm sure. Mom was in Mass General from November twentieth through December third. We brought her turkey in a Tupperware. Alma drew her a card."
"Okay. Thank you."
"Are you Maren, what's going on? This is the second time this week you've called to "
"I'm fine, David. Thank you."
She hung up.
Cranberry sauce with orange zest. David's mother and the oven. Alma asleep on the couch. All of it every sensory detail, every emotional texture fabricated. Installed. Written to her hippocampus during a session she didn't remember, constructed from her own neural patterns and fed back to her in a format her brain accepted as autobiography.
She sat on the bench. The harbor was grey-green, choppy, speckled with whitecaps that appeared and vanished like thoughts she couldn't hold. A ferry moved toward the airport, heavy and slow.
She began to catalogue.
She went through her memories the way she'd go through a data set systematically, chronologically, starting eighteen months ago and working forward. For each memory, she asked: can I verify this independently? Is there a photograph, an email, a text, a witness? And for each memory she could not verify, she placed it in a mental quarantine, a holding zone labeled unconfirmed.
The quarantine filled quickly.
A conference in Philadelphia she remembered attending she could picture the hotel lobby, the bad carpet, the woman at the registration desk who had a mole above her left eyebrow. She searched her email for a confirmation. Nothing. She checked the conference website. The conference existed, but the year she remembered attending was the year it had been canceled due to a blizzard.
A Saturday at the Boston Public Library with Alma reading room, the green desk lamps, Alma whispering too loudly about wanting a snack. She had no photos. Alma was too young to confirm or deny dates with precision.
A phone call with her mother in Portland something about the gutters, her mother complaining about the cost, Maren offering to send money. She checked her phone records. No call to her mother on the date she remembered.
Three memories. Three failures.
She sat on the bench for a long time, hands in her coat pockets, face turned toward the harbor wind, and thought about the nature of identity.
She was a scientist. She understood, intellectually, that identity was not a fixed structure but a continuous process a narrative the brain constructed from available evidence, updated in real time, maintained through the ongoing act of remembering. She'd read Bartlett. She'd read Loftus. She knew that all memory was reconstructive every time you remembered something, you rebuilt it from stored components, and each rebuilding introduced subtle modifications, like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. Nobody's memories were perfectly accurate. Nobody's past was perfectly preserved.
But there was a difference between the natural erosion of memory and the deliberate replacement of it. Natural memory was inaccurate. Her memory was authored. Someone had sat down at a desk, at a terminal, in a clean room and written scenes for her life and filed them where she couldn't tell them from the real ones. Someone had decided that her Saturday should be an aquarium visit instead of whatever it actually was. Someone had decided that her Thanksgiving should include cranberry sauce and a sleeping child.
Who wrote my life? she thought.
And then: Who am I, if even I don't know the answer?
She picked up Alma at three-thirty. The rain boots clicked. Alma talked about a science experiment vinegar and baking soda, a volcano in a plastic cup, Noor's dog eating the paper towels. Normal. Real. Utterly and verifiably real, because it was happening now, in the present tense, and the present was the one thing that couldn't be implanted.
She held Alma's hand the entire walk and did not let go until they reached the apartment door, and even then she lingered her fingers around her daughter's small, warm fist for two seconds longer than usual, a delay that Alma didn't notice and that Maren felt in her chest like a held breath.
That night, after Alma was asleep Charlotte's Web, chapter thirteen, the chapter where Wilbur can't sleep because he's worried Maren sat at the kitchen table and did not open her laptop. She did not review data. She did not run analyses or cross-reference files or plan for the twelve-minute window.
Instead, she closed her eyes and listened to the apartment. The radiator. The street. A distant siren. Alma's breathing. The refrigerator's hum.
She tried to find herself in the sounds. She tried to locate the part of Maren Shaw that was not a memory, not a stored file, not a data point in someone else's experiment. The part that was irreducible. The part that existed now, in this room, in this body, holding this air in these lungs.
It was there. Small. Stubborn. Difficult to quantify.
But it was there.