Artwork by Holly Wood, found on Instagram and fineartamerica.

He threw the final pages into the fire as she wept. He told her that she couldn’t have those memories anymore. That they were problematic for him. That she shouldn’t have been so careless as to have left them out where he could find them. And she wept because they were hers, and hers alone, stolen from her and gone forever. Never written to affect anyone else. Never written for anyone else. Aware that they had destroyed a part of him, but angry because it was a suicide being positioned as a homicide. She had accidentally left the weapon out but hadn’t wielded it herself.

And she thought about the past, and what burned. Still in her head, of course. But you can’t trust the unrecorded … not really. He knew that. He could change it now without her knowing. Bend it and break it and fade it until it was something else completely. Until she couldn’t be certain of what was and what wasn’t. Until she doubted herself fully. Until she was his again. Confused, and apathetic, and stubbed out, but his.

She wiped her tears away and began to plot a more permanent, less flammable, escape.