Unforgettable - eARC Read Free Page B

pedaled away.
    Once I was sure I had left him more than a minute behind, I pulled over to catch my breath. I got out my iPhone and checked the time. It would be a little after eight a.m. on the East Coast of the United States. Perfect. I don’t have any contacts listed in the phone—not because storing phone numbers would be a security problem but because it would forget them after I entered them. So I dialed a number I had memorized.
    A computer-generated female voice on the other end answered, “How may I direct your call?”
    “Edward Strong,” I said.
    The phone rang a few times, then someone picked up. “Strong here.”
    “Mr. Strong,” I said, “in the lower drawer on the right side of your desk, there is a manila file folder labeled ‘CODE NAME LETHE.’ I need you to pull it out and read the cover letter. There should also be an authentication protocol sheet in there.”
    Having to go through this sort of rigmarole every time I reported in was an inconvenience. But what else could I do?
    My name is Nat Morgan. And even though they don’t remember me, I work for the CIA.

Chapter Two
    I’ve been forgotten all my life. The day I was born, my parents left me at the hospital and drove home. They didn’t realize it until a couple of hours later, when my grandmother arrived from out of town and asked where the baby was.
    My mother cried all the way back to the hospital, feeling guilty because she couldn’t even remember giving birth to me. It probably didn’t help that my grandmother was in the back seat, telling her what a bad mother she was obviously going to be. When my parents returned to the maternity ward, the nurses were very confused, because no one had filled out the paperwork on my birth. They finally located me because I was the only baby left after they’d accounted for the rest.
    After they got home, guilt over forgetting me made my mother cling to me. She sat in the rocking chair in the living room and held me for hours. To her shock, both my father and my grandmother forgot my existence after leaving the room.
    Once I was old enough to understand, my mother read me the journal entry she wrote that night, still cradling me in one arm. She was exhausted, but terrified that she would forget me again if she fell asleep.
    Which is exactly what happened.
    * * *
    For obvious reasons, I wasn’t the easiest child to raise. My mother never complained to me, so it wasn’t until I read her diaries that I understood how difficult it was for her, particularly at first.
    She would be puzzled to hear a baby crying in the apartment and go to investigate. I would be in a crib in the room she and my father had decorated as a nursery back when she was pregnant. She would pick me up to try to calm me down while she figured out whose baby I was. Then she would remember that she wasn’t pregnant anymore and wonder if I was hers and if she had amnesia. Then she would go and check her journal to try to figure things out.
    I don’t know how many times she went through that cycle of rediscovering me before she started pinning a note on my jumper that read “Tina, you don’t remember him, but this is your baby, Nat. Read your journal.”
    Over the next few years, my mother set old-fashioned wind-up alarm clocks with notes on them to remind herself to feed me and check up on me. Even after I was old enough to find her when I needed something, she kept detailed journals of her interactions with me. Fortunately, she liked the feel of writing in a paper journal, because anything she typed into a computer about me would soon end up changed to read as if I had never been there. Eventually she discovered that if she printed something out immediately, the printed copy wouldn’t change, so she would sometimes take pictures of me with a webcam and print them out to put in a photo album.
    Because all the hospital records were on computer, there was no record of my birth, and since she and my father hadn’t decided on a name