The Cost of Remembering

Jessica held the man’s gaze across the small café table, the weight of his words pressing down on her like an iron hand.

“It’s about what you were meant to remember.”

She swallowed, her fingers tightening around the stem of her wine glass. Try me.

Jessica had spent years trying to escape the past, her past. But now, sitting across from this man who claimed to have spent a lifetime keeping the past buried, she was beginning to wonder if it had ever truly been hers at all.

The café felt too quiet. The air too thick. Leanna and Olivia were both waiting. Watching. But Jessica could feel it now, the moment before the fall. Before she stepped into something she couldn’t take back.

She exhaled. “Talk.”

The man studied her for a long moment. Then, softly he stated, “You were never meant to exist.”

Jessica tapped the rim of her glass. “You’ll have to take a number.”

She didn’t flinch. She’d always known the records she found were only the surface. “Erased by who?” she asked anyway, testing how much he’d admit.

The man set his glass down carefully. “You already know this isn’t the first time your name has appeared in history,” he said.

Jessica nodded. “I’ve seen the records.”

“But you haven’t seen all of them.”

Jessica narrowed her eyes.

The man exhaled. “The names you found, the ones that matched yours? Those were only the ones that were meant to be found.”

A pause. Then—“The real records were erased.”

Jessica stilled. “Erased by who?”

The man’s expression was unreadable. “By people like me.”

Jessica’s pulse tightened. Jessica had spent years chasing ghosts. And now, she was sitting across from a man who had been keeping them hidden.

She leaned forward, voice steady. “Why?”

The man met her gaze. “Because some things aren’t meant to be remembered.”

She had heard that warning before, but this was not Black’s promises of control. This wasn't even prophecy. This was something colder: silence. They didn’t want power from her memory. They wanted absence.

Jessica exhaled slowly. “You’re telling me that someone has been wiping the past clean? That this—” she gestured vaguely to herself, to the weight pressing against her chest, “—has happened before?”

The man nodded. “But it never lasted.”

Jessica swallowed. “Why not?”

There was a long silence before he softly replied, “Because they always remember.”

Jessica swallowed hard. He wasn’t telling her something new. He was naming the thing she’d been guarding in silence all along. Still the same, the man’s words hung in the air like smoke. The first vessel. The original memory.

Jessica didn’t flinch. She had known pieces of this all along, She had seen them scratched into ledgers, whispered through erased names, carved into tombstones that shouldn’t have existed. What mattered wasn’t whether she had proof. She was the proof.

She leaned back, her gaze steady. “You kill anyone who gets too close. Pasolini. Bellanti. Ricci. Anyone who starts remembering enough to threaten the silence.”

The man didn’t deny it. His silence was confirmation.

Jessica tapped the rim of her glass, the sound sharp in the quiet café. “You don’t care about me. You care about what I carry, about how much of it I’ve already let surface. That’s what keeps you up at night.”

His jaw tightened, but he said nothing.

Jessica stood, pushing back her chair. Leanna and Olivia were already watching her, waiting for the next step.

She looked down at the man one last time. “Then here’s your problem. I’m not done remembering.”

She turned to Olivia and Leanna. “We’re going to Rome.”

Olivia frowned. “We just came from Rome.”

Jessica’s voice was firm, cutting through the weight of the moment. “Then we didn’t look hard enough.”

She stepped toward the door, her coat catching the light. Over her shoulder, without slowing, she added:

“And when we find the first, you’ll know exactly how much I’ve kept to myself.”