Yet I remembered the years that followed.
The bedroom with the broken lock.
The medication my mother insisted I take.
The birthdays nobody celebrated.
The way my parents stopped allowing visitors into the house.
And the terrible feeling that the world outside my window had forgotten I existed.
I looked at Avery.
"How did I manage to get an apartment, a business license, and a bank account if I'm legally dead?"
Her eyes filled with tears.
"That's what frightened me."
She opened another folder.
"The death was registered in our old county. But your identification records were never consistently updated across the other systems."
I stared at her.
"So I've been living with two different official histories?"
She nodded.
"One says you're alive. The other says you died."
I looked toward the greenhouse.
Sunlight shone through the glass.
Rows of lavender and rosemary swayed beneath the ceiling fans.
Everything I'd built over the past four years suddenly felt fragile.
