Page 139 of The Love Operation

Delenn sits back, arms dropping to her sides, steadier now, but still grave. “Memory doesn’t work the way we want it to. Even when it feels like you’re inside a virtual reality simulation, you’re not watching a perfect playback. You’re watching a reconstruction.”

I blink at her.

She continues, carefully. “Each time you revisit a memory, your brain reassembles it from fragments. It fills in blanks with whatever it has on hand—emotions, beliefs, current knowledge. It’s not a pristine recording of reality. It’s a reedit. And every time you recall it, it gets edited again. This all happens without us being consciously aware that we’re changing anything.”

I shake my head. “No. These weren’t fuzzy impressions. They were vivid. Exact. I was inside these memories.”

“I know,” she says gently, like a mother trying to soothe a hurting child. “That’s what makes it so convincing. But vividness doesn’t equal accuracy. In fact, the more emotionally charged a memory is, the more likely it is to be distorted. The details feel concrete, but they’re often influenced and changed by what we want to believe. Our brains edit to protect us, to preserve our self-images. We remember what we need to believe.”

My throat tightens. “Then what’s the point of the study if the memories aren’t even trustworthy?”

“The study was never about autobiographical truth,” she says. “It was about improving educational retention—helping students and professionals better encode and retrieve specific data. You’re the outlier. You’re the only one who’s been diving into personal memory.”

“Because I’m the only one who can,” I argue, desperation creeping in. “Maybe this aspect is different for me too. The electrical impulse, the chemical cocktail—what if I’m neurologically different, and this is possible for me?”

She looks at me with pity. “Anything’s possible. But not likely. You’re still human, and human memory is deeply fallible. It’s why eyewitnesses swear by contradictory versions of the same event. The study amplified your recall and had significant and unexpected effects, but I don’t think it fixed this distortion. If anything, it made the illusions sharper. So, no, I don’t think you were rewatching facts. I think you were watching a version of the events that your brain curated to protect you, to help you make sense of the hurt.”

I stare at her, unable to move. The walls shrink in around me.

My memories—my proof—are curated stories? Versions of events, but not truth?

No.

That can’t be right.

But even as I deny it, something inside me cracks, just enough to let panic in.

My mind runs wild, thinking of all the memories I visited, all the time I wasted, thinking I was getting clarity on Benedict, Isaac, every heartbreak and failure.

I don’t know what’s real anymore.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I nearly gasp the words.

“Because I didn’t want to bias the study. If I’d told you, you’d start second-guessing everything. You’d overcorrect, potentially corrupt the data without meaning to. That’s why I made you promise not to go back. Because this was never supposed to be about personal healing. This was research. This is science.”

The words hit harder than I expect.

I stand and feel incredibly unsteady on my feet. This is the last straw—worse than, if that’s possible.

“You should’ve told me from the beginning,” I say, and head toward the door, my vision still a little wonky.

“And you should’ve kept your promise. Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“Cord—”

But I’m already out the door, through the hallway, into the stairwell.

I run out of the building. Across the parking lot.

I drive home with the windows down, my pulse hammering against the wheel.

Delenn’s voice scrapes at the inside of my skull: This was never supposed to be about personal healing. It hits like an accusation.

In all the study prep, how did this not come up?

Some part of my brain whispers, Because this isn’t your field. Because Delenn is the neuroscientist. Because this study had nothing to do with going back in time.