When he reached his car, his phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number: "They verified you. They don't forget."

"Who are you?" He heard his own voice as though recorded and replayed.

He closed the forum tab. Some things, he decided, were best kept in the dark between two people—the light to see, the shadow to remember. The sanatorium remained a place that fixed the living by severing them from pieces of themselves. It was not evil; it was a kind of mercy that demanded a cost. In a world full of files waiting to be named and shared, the ledger reminded him that not everything found belongs to the finder.

She smiled. It was the kind of smile that had once reassured children and then repaid them with absence. "Patient," she said. "Keeper, now."