The Memory Keeper

Chapter 1

In a small office with only one dreary, rain-streaked window, sat a young woman with a small bouquet of blue flowers, perhaps in her late teens. Not a girl anymore, but not quite yet a woman. Her elbows were upon the cluttered desk in front of her, chin cupped in one hand. The walls shook as the train clattered down the tracks around Coldton's main square, the room darkening for a few moments as exhaust smoke filled the window.

Drops of rain slipped from a leak in the ceiling, catching the lamplight like little flames before breaking on the dull wooden floor.

After a sigh, she started to pluck the petals from the bouquet, letting them fall across the papers and books before her like little blue fingers pointing every which way. She did not know where it came from, but somehow it put her at odds.

Her name was Natalie Gorman, and she was what people in her world called a mind weaver, able to weave the memories of others, not unlike altering a gown or rearranging a doll house. If she had her choice, she would of preferred to have been a middle, someone able to see through the veil of the living to the dead, but that gift was inherited, as well as witchery. Mind weavers were far more rare, and that pebble seemed to have skipped across the pond of generations to land into her soul from the moment of her existence. Some would call it a curse, and there were more than enough moments Natalie thought of it that way, too.

But altering memories was not the hard part. Not for Natalie. It was like finding the loose thread and slowly pulling until the whole blanket unraveled. Then she was meant to sew it back, but in a completely different pattern. It was a skill she had since she could recall her own memories. No, the hard part for Natalie was snuffing those memories out completely, as in, destroying the artifacts brought to her by her clients. An old locket, perhaps. A pair of shoes or jacket or porcelain doll. Natalie always felt that in some way, a memory deserved to live on, if only through an object that became the focal point of it all, because in the end, it was only an object, not the memory itself. Which is why she kept a secret cabinet full of all kinds of things. Not to use, or treasure. But remember.

Colette, the mind weaver queen, did not agree, and that was why it was forbidden to keep anything a client left behind. It was for their protection, to snuff out anything they wished to rewrite in their own mind. And it was the mind weaver's job to do this.

Natalie was a very talented mind weaver. She just... broke too many rules.

And she was about to break the biggest one of all. She just did not know it yet.

***

Earlier that day Natalie felt content as a cat, the streets of Coldton unraveling like a ball of yarn as she skipped around others out to enjoy the breezy day, a cup of mint tea in her hand, heat roiling out of the mouth of the lid like the train's chimney, which clattered down the tracks around the square. As she made a short cut through the train station on her way home from some errands, and past the cawing merchants, who shouted and beckoned passersby to take advantage of their wares or fresh fish straight from the river of Winter Wells, someone clamped onto her shoulder. She had turned to see a young man of perhaps her age. He looked somewhat harried, as though she had been the one to seize him, but when their eyes met, he smiled. She searched his face for some sort of explanation.

"Sorry, sir, do I know you?"

His smile slowly faded, and he stepped back. "My apologies. I thought you were someone else."

There was a moment of quiet before he tilted his hat and walked away. Natalie continued at a brisk pace down a narrow cobblestone corner just off the main route. Other than the odd interruption, and scolding herself for thinking her face too common, despite how untrue that was, her morning had gone quite smoothly.