He went to the old cemetery on the edge of town, the one they stopped maintaining after the 90s. Behind a tangle of briars, he found three small stones, half-swallowed by earth. The dates were illegible. But the numbers were not. Carved into the base of the central stone, as if added later by a shaking hand: 17 .
He had forgotten. The mind, kind and cruel in equal measure, had sealed it all away. The foster home had given him a new story. A clean one. No stillborn sister. No parents dead in a fluorescent-lit room. Just a car crash. Just an accident. Just a normal orphan’s grief.
From that night on, Roy slept soundly. He still saw 17 now and then—on a digital clock, on a page number, in the change from a coffee. But it no longer felt like a curse. It felt like a wave. A small, cold hand letting go at last.
Stuart. His surname. He had no memory of a Margaret or a Thomas. No memory of a stillborn sibling. His parents had died when he was seven—car accident, he’d been told. He was an only child. But the archive did not lie. The ink did not fade.