The first time it happened, Petra was almost certain she had simply misremembered.
She had told Marcus about the conversation with her mother on the Tuesday — she was confident it was the Tuesday, because she had been at home that day, and she was only at home on Tuesdays now that the office had moved. She remembered telling him while he was at his desk, remembered the specific quality of his attention, which was the kind that was present in body and absent in everything else. She remembered that he had said he understood.
Three weeks later, in the middle of an argument about something else entirely, he mentioned that she had never told him. She said she had. He said she hadn't, and he said it not with anger but with a kind of patient sorrow, as if this was a pattern he had noticed before and had not wished to name.
"You do this," he said. "You think you've told me things. Then you get upset when I don't respond in a way that would only make sense if I actually knew."
She spent three days wondering if he was right.
The second time was easier for him because she had already doubted herself once. A dinner reservation she was certain she had made. A message she was sure she had sent. A plan she knew had been agreed. Each time he was gentle, each time he was regretful, and each time — she noticed this only later — the misremembering reflected poorly on her in a specific way. She was disorganised. She was forgetful. She was, more than once, "not quite present lately."
She began to compensate. She started keeping notes — not because she was a notes person, but because she needed the external record to anchor her against the drift she was starting to feel in her own memory. She wrote down conversations. She photographed text messages before discussions she thought might become contested. She did this secretly, because telling Marcus would have produced the look — the quiet, studied concern — that she had come to dread more than the arguments.
The notes helped. But they also created a new problem: she could not explain to herself why she felt she needed them. A person who keeps secret records of their own conversations to defend against their partner is a person who has already, somewhere beneath the level of conscious assessment, accepted that the ground beneath them cannot be trusted.
She had a friend, Dora, who was direct in a way most people found uncomfortable and Petra had always found essential. She called Dora on a Sunday in October, ostensibly to arrange lunch, and found herself talking for an hour and twenty minutes about the notes and what they contained and why she had felt the need to compile them.
Dora listened without interrupting, which was unusual enough that Petra noticed it.
"Read me one," Dora said, when she had finished.
Petra read the entry from the Tuesday in July. The dinner reservation. The message. The conversation about her mother. She read them in sequence, with the dates and the context she had recorded at the time.
"He says he doesn't remember any of these," Petra said. "Or that they didn't happen the way I've written them. And I know what I've written is accurate. I wrote it at the time. But when he says it, I still start to wonder."
"That's what he's making you do," Dora said.
"He's not doing it on purpose," Petra said, and then stopped.
"Why did you say that?" Dora asked.
Petra thought about it. She had said it automatically. As a reflex. She could not, when she examined it, identify the evidence for the claim. She could only identify that she had been saying it — to Dora, to herself, to the version of herself that woke at three in the morning and tried to determine whether she was losing her mind — for as long as the pattern had been going on.
She moved out in November. The process of moving was the strangest part: the way the accumulated small certainties she had ceded came back to her almost immediately, like circulation returning to a limb. Within a week she felt, for the first time in longer than she could accurately date, like the authoritative source of her own experience.
She kept the notes. She did not need them anymore — she kept them as a kind of document, the way some people keep letters from a period of their life they do not want to forget but do not want to repeat. They were the record of a reality that had been systematically contested, and of the work she had done, almost entirely alone, to keep some version of it intact.
Two months later she received a message from a woman she did not know, who had found her name through a mutual contact and who wanted to ask her, very carefully and with evident embarrassment, whether she had ever found that her memory became unreliable when she was with Marcus — because it had happened to her too, or it had seemed to, and she had spent the last six months trying to determine whether it was her or him.
Petra replied immediately. She said: it was him. She said: I kept notes. She said: I will send you everything.