He said, "Tell me," and I did.
I told him everything.
Not in one sitting — it took three evenings, broken by the ordinary necessities of dinner and sleep and the demands of the investigation that continued its quiet work in the background. I told him in fragments, the way memory actually works, the way truth actually surfaces when you have held it alone for a very long time. I told him about the first life I could clearly remember, which was nothing like this one — a coastal city, a different century, a different name. I told him about learning, over decades of accumulated living, that the memories did not fade the way dreams fade. They stayed. They accrued interest.
I told him about the deaths.
