With only thirty minutes before she needed to be out onstage, Emeline picked up the book, opened to the dog-eared page, and read the poem again.
She tried typing in the title first:Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)
The notification turned red and her phone buzzed.
That password is incorrect.
She tried again—this time with no caps. Then all caps.
More buzzing. More red.
Emeline bared her teeth at the screen. She glanced at the time. Twenty-five minutes before she needed to go out onstage.
She scanned down the poem until her gaze snagged on that one little line:Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Hunching over her phone, with the screen inches from her face, Emeline typed:
love is so short
The folder opened. A list of her old songs popped up—dozens and dozens of them. Emeline sat frozen, staring at them all. In almost two years of trying to guess passwords, she’d failed to open this folder. She hadn’t been able to listen to these songs.
With shaking hands, Emeline connected her headphones and tapped PLAY.
The songs transported her backwards in time, to when she first wrote them. As each one melted into the next, as her voice sang lyrics and melodies from her past, memories burst like colors across a blank canvas.
Because inside each and every one of these songs—songs she’d written before she ever left Edgewood—memories were hidden.
Emeline choked on them. Hot tears burned in her eyes as she tapped the next file, and the next, racing through songs and, with them, memories that had been stolen from her. Images of a younger Sable flashed before her eyes, interwoven with a younger Rooke. And someone else.
Hawthorne.
He was everywhere, with his dark hair and strange eyes. Her songs were so full of him, Emeline felt like she was drowning in him. Hawthorne, sitting next to the fire, reading a book. Hawthorne, shucking off his shirt and diving into a moonlit pond.Hawthorne, climbing in through her bedroom window. Kissing her in the dark.
She’d embedded him inside her music.
Because songs were never just songs for Emeline. They were capsules, each one containing a moment trapped inside it.
As the next one started to play through her headphones, an image of a tree rose up in her mind. Emeline could see its thirsty roots; the twisting, twirling gray-brown bark; the gnarly branches stretching towards the sky. A silent sentinel, standing guard at the edge of the woods.
Her tree.
As it rose there in her mind, something snapped.
The Forgetting broke.
All her lost memories came flooding back.
THIRTY-EIGHT
EMELINE WAS THIRTEEN WHENher tree went missing.
It was a crisp April morning, and everything was frosted with dew. She woke to find Pa on the balcony, staring at the woods, his face marred by a frown.
“They took it,” he murmured. She couldn’t tell if it was anger that tinged his voice, or fear.
When she looked where he looked—to the space in the hedge—she realized he was talking about her tree.
Which was gone.
