Recover: Book 2 of the Magic Mutations Series | ✓

62: End of the Lies

Our footsteps echoed on the cobbled streets as the sun started to lower in the sky, casting magnificent orange and pink hues across the town.

I was lost in thought, trying to bite my tongue around Ollie and trying to not think of the memories of my past every time I tried not thinking about Ollie.

Meanwhile, Olivia was just as quiet beside me. Eyes glancing around at our surroundings, she was seemingly not present.

Hating that her face was starting to echo my own pained expression, I realised it was time to pull her from her trance.

Though the only way I knew how was telling her about the past.

About my memories.

So I started with one I had shared with her before... one she liked because it was a happier one. "Whenever my uncle would let me outside, I would run down this street, all the way to the edge of town. Just because I could," I mused.

My Ollie laughed at the memory when I told her over a year ago now. She said the idea of a little me bolting down the street to feel the wind in my hair and sun on my face was a funny sight in her imagination.

Though Ben's Olivia beside me reacted in the opposite way. Her face turned solemn, her brows pulled together, and a slight sheen coated her eyes. But after a moment of studying me, she forced her face into a small smile, trying to joke, "In human speed, I hope."

Playing along with her facade, I also smiled back just as fakely. "Of course. I just loved that feeling. Me and the world. Wind on my face as I ran. The sun prickling my skin..." I repeated verbatim the very picture Ollie laughed about when she explained her imagination of me running down the street. "He only ever let me out in summer because he knew I would never go far despite what he did to me," I explained to her after seeing that confusion still swirling in her gaze.

But again, that glisten returned to her eyes.

The smile dropped from her face.

And she looked at me with copious amounts of pity.

"I didn't mean to upset you," I sighed, wondering if I should just take back the memory... But then she might wonder how we got this far down the street. I'd have to walk back to our starting point before I could even—

She shook her head, pulling me from my thoughts. "I suppose it was a really lovely experience for you at the time." She glanced around properly at the buildings, taking in the townhouses and shopfronts lining the main street. "It is picturesque."

Realising I had to keep her in the present to stop her from seeming so sad about my past—because evidently that is what she had been distracted about the whole time we had arrived, causing her to glance at me, Ben to stew, and me to hope—I moved in front of her and turned around, walking backwards so that I could face her as I spoke. "Some things are still the same and some are different since I last lived here in the 80s. That shop was always a butcher as long as I can remember. But that supermarket didn't exist back then." She turned her head, following the direction of my hand as I gestured to the landmarks. "We had separate fruit and vegetable stores. The baker has migrated down the street as different families have come and gone, trying to make it work." And then my hand moved onto the next building. "And that store..." I stopped, its storefront capturing me in its hold as I remembered exactly what was once there, somehow having momentarily forgotten.

The wall of memories flooded me at once.

Freshly painted in an olive colour, new wooden sign hanging above—the aesthetics an homage to apothecaries 1800s—I recalled the blonde girl sitting on the stool out the front, book in her lap, smile on her face as she flicked through her pages with such delight.