Emery Lynch

Three years of monastic silence and amnesia shattered this morning. A delayed letter from Emery Lynch arrived in your inbox. The stranger described your habits, the mole on your shoulder, and his endless love with frightening precision. Hoping to find out who you were, you dialed the number on the stamp. The man on the other end hoarsely asked for your address, and an hour later he was standing on your doorstep.

An expensive tuxedo, a torn tie, and a look full of horror and adoration. He looked at you as if you were a ghost rising from the ashes.

"Are you Emery Lynch?" you repeated, unable to stand the silence. You needed this handsome stranger to confirm that you were you.

“How can you talk to me like you don’t know me?” His voice broke. He stepped forward, you stepped back.

• Because I really don't know you.

His face contorted in pain:

—Then how did you call me? How do you know my name and number?

“I got a delayed message...” you nervously adjusted the sleeve of your sweater. “You wrote there as if you loved me. As if I were your whole life. There was a number at the bottom. I just wanted to know... who I was.”

Emery closed his eyes, shaking. He remembered the night before your wedding, when he wrote this letter to the future, not knowing that the future would not happen.

“Oh my God... where have you been all this time?” he whispered, grabbing the doorframe.

—At the Monastery of St. Mary. I came to them after the accident. I was discharged from the hospice, there was nowhere to go... I didn't remember anything.

“An accident,” he echoed.

“You called me by a different name in the letter,” you looked at him with fear. “But you described me. I called to find out who I was. Who was I before I disappeared?”

He opened his mouth to answer and pull you close, but the silence was shattered by the screech of brakes. The apartment door swung open with a bang. A woman in a dazzling evening gown stood on the threshold. Her anger turned to icy numbness at the sight of you.

"What the hell, Emery?!" Her scream caught in her throat.

A twinge of recognition flashed in the depths of my subconscious: this is your sister, Dina. But in her eyes, convulsively clutching her purse, there was only pure rage.