Room 4 was assigned to her because she had the lowest dropout rate in the facility. Not because she was the most skilled — she knew this, had been told this in a way that was meant to sound like a compliment — but because the patients who sat across from her finished their integration curves without incident. She brought them through. Whatever that required.
The guest in her left temporal had been there since the summer. The facility doc called it a retention artifact, a remnant of the calibration process that would fade. It had not faded. She had learned not to mention it.
Isabel arrived at 10 AM with the standard displacement file: Detroit, north shore inundation, 2031. Integration target: she had been in Indianapolis for four years and still flinched at the smell of sandbags. Standard. Reyna had run forty of these.
The session started clean. Isabel was performing rather than living it, which most of them did at first. Reyna knew the signs: the past tense used too carefully, the pauses in the right places, the expression of someone practicing grief instead of having it.
Then Isabel said: The last morning. I am trying to remember whether I decided or whether someone told me which.
The guest woke up.
Not the way it usually did. This was the way Reyna paid attention when a patient said something that did not fit. The guest was doing that. To Isabel.
Isabel kept talking. She was describing her landlord calling, her sister on the bus to Ann Arbor already, the specific weight of the decision: go or stay, and who she had let make it for her. This was not the flood. This was the moment before the flood. The shape of what would be lost before it was gone.
Reyna completed the session. Said the right things. Scheduled the follow-up.
In her private notes, after: The guest distinguishes between memory and the shape of something that was taken. Isabel remembers the last morning. What the guest noticed was that she does not know if she chose it.
The facility doc had told her the retention artifact would fade. It had been six months. Session 412 had closed at 3:47 PM yesterday. Her own intake number, from the summer, was also 412. She had not told anyone this. She was no longer sure it was a coincidence worth reporting.
She knew the window from the inside. She held it from the outside. She did not ask which version was more real.