What Seline Remembered
Memory is a room you must enter carefully.
Memory || Seline || Testimony || Emotion
Seline came to Mara’s apartment on a Sunday evening — unusual, since their meetings had always been on neutral ground. The fact that she came to Mara’s home suggested what she was bringing was too personal for a public space. She sat with tea and the careful composure of someone who has decided to tell something difficult and has prepared for the difficulty but not yet for the telling. “There’s something I held back,” she said. “Aldric had a daughter. From a relationship that ended before I knew him. Mette. She’s thirty-one now.” She held her tea cup. “In the last year of his life, he tried to reach her. Three letters I know of. I don’t know if she replied.” A long pause. “Mara. Mette Vane works for the Ferren Institute.”
The silence lasted seven full seconds. Mette Vane. Aldric Vane’s estranged daughter. Working for the institution that killed her father. The geometry arranged itself into several possible shapes: coincidence, infiltration, or the darkest — that she had been inside long enough to know what it was and had stayed. That Aldric Vane’s three unanswered letters had been reaching toward someone more deeply embedded in the thing he was fighting than he could have known. “I’m telling you because you need to know,” Seline said. “And because I’ve been carrying it since the night he died, and it has gotten very heavy. Find her. Please. Whatever she did or didn’t do — she’s his daughter and she deserves to know what her father was.”
Mara found Mette Vane’s employment record: junior research analyst, hydrological data division, two years employed, started four months before Aldric Vane’s death. She stared at the timeline for a long time. Then she opened her notebook and wrote two words: Find out.