Few people are good at admitting their mistakes. I am even less adept at it than most. I created myself, and my Mind Palace, with a thought toward perfection, even when I was a very young child. If I was always right, I thought, I could never be in danger. When I was small, mistakes brought ridicule from my brother and my schoolmates. When I became an adult, they cost lives.
Of course, there is a difference between mistaking the perpetrator of a murder and hurting someone's feelings, a distinction that, after a while, I ignored. I told myself that if I didn't care what anyone thought of me, they shouldn't care what I thought of them. It was a shield between me and the world, meant to keep me safe from facing my fallibility.
And then a Christmas party happened that changed me forever.
I will never forget the moment Molly Hooper walked through the door. It's fortunate for me that Lestrade reacted as strongly as he did. No one saw that my face changed, too. She looked like my Science Girl, but dressed up like a Christmas present. And she was beautiful. It's not that—this is difficult to express in adequate words—it's not that she was only beautiful just then, in her dress, with her lips red. It was just that I realized, for the first time, that to me she had always been beautiful.
And so, of course, I hurt her. I didn't mean to do it, but when I realized exactly where my deductions pointed, I was scared, frightened that someone would see how confused I was, like a little boy seeing girls at a school dance suddenly gone from tomboys in pigtails to women in crinolines and high heels.
"You always say such horrible things."
At that moment, Molly Hooper, for the first time, said the exact same thing my Science Girl would have said. Her voice echoed in my mind, and I could see her both in front of me and inside my head, with the same hurt look on her face.
So I did something I never did. I apologized. And because she was Molly, she understood. She knew that something between us had irrevocably changed, knew that I loved her, I think, though I didn't know it yet.
I kissed her cheek, and electricity moved through me. The moment broke quickly, or I might have lost more control than I'd already surrendered, but it was enough. Everyone else in the room simply though I'd somehow reached greater enlightenment, greater ability to see my flaws.
It's true; I had. But only Molly knew it was more than that. The Science Girl smiled inside my head, and she wore Molly's smile.
That night, as I slipped into bed, I visited the morgue in my mind. "Well done, Sherlock," said the girl, sitting on the edge of a metal table next to a corpse and applauding slowly.
"Silly mistake," I groused.
She laughed. "Sometimes mistakes are useful. Sometimes they show us who our friends are, who we really love. They bring us closer."
I couldn't deny it. My Memory Palace was no longer the deceptively perfect place I'd imagined. I now saw it for what it was—the flawed creation of a man deeply capable of error. It should have unsettled me, but it didn't. I knew I was simply seeing the truth for what it was, and in so doing, my lips had touched the face of Molly Hooper, an act I could never undo—never wanted to undo.
