Page 42 of Memories of the Lost

“No. I knew we’d lived in New Hampshire, because that’s what my birth certificate said when I had to get a new passport.” She frowned, recalling. “Remember, I applied so we could do our tour, and I had the expired passport but not the birth certificate. It took a couple of weeks to get it all straightened out.”

“Yeah! We were freaking out because we were afraid it wouldn’t get here in time.”

Tillie nodded. “But nothing about LA.”

He looked grave. “Maybe the episode was your brain trying to get you to remember something.”

Something dark wiggled in her gut. “I’m scared.”

“I get it.” He straightened. “Did you look up the story online?”

“Yeah. It’s all true. Nothing else to go on, though. The firestorm killed four people, one being Matilda. Who I think”—she stood, grabbed the photo of the child from the top of the box, and handed it to him—“is this little girl. Same picture.”

“So sad,” he said. “What a cutie.”

Tillie folded her hands in her lap, as if she could make sense of things by creating order in her body.

“I’m not getting the timeline here,” Jon said. “You saw the death certificate and the other articles, and looked them up, and then you started painting?”

“Yeah. I was trying to get out of my head.”

“And then what? Blacked out?”

“Kind of? I don’t know. It’s not like passing out. I ...” She couldn’t sit, and stood up to pace again. On the table were the original sketches of the cat. “It happened a couple of days ago, too. I drew this cat, over and over.”

His face showed no expression as he leafed through the group of drawings, looked at the dark rendition of Tillie’s mother. “Same cat.”

“Yeah.”

“But what happened, exactly?”

“I started painting, and then when I came back to myself, I had done all this work and had no memory of it.”

His soft dark eyes were sober. “Do you think you might be having an emotional breakdown, maybe over your mom’s death? You did take it pretty hard.”

“I don’t know!” she said with exasperation. “Not really. I took it hard because I loved her, and she was my mom, and I’m going to miss her terribly. That feels normal, and she died five months ago. This just started.”

“What triggered it?”

She sank down beside him. “That weird painting at your show.”

“Weird painting? One of mine?”

“No, no. It’s in another part of the gallery, in the back. Did I not tell you about it?”

He frowned. “Not that I know of.”

“Sorry.” She told him the whole story, seeing the painting, feeling so weird, getting the aura, meeting Liam. “And then I got a migraine that night and just went to bed. I thought that all the weirdness was the headache.”

He’d been around her long enough to understand how her migraines worked. She was luckily not a person who often suffered for days on end, but they could be intense while they lasted. “What did Liam do that night?”

“He got me into bed and slept on the couch.”

“Seriously?” His eyebrows rose.

“Right?” She shook her head.

“So you haven’t slept with him yet?”