Henry was four years old when he realized that he was different. His mom had begun sending him to daycare when he was 3 years old and for the first year he didn't notice anything different between himself and the other children. But around the time he turned four years old, he began to notice that while his playmates stay the same, he kept getting bigger and taller. When he asked his mother what was happening to him, she simply told him that he was becoming a big boy and that it happened to everyone.

Except it didn't happen to anyone else, at least as far as Henry knew.

When he was five, he got too old to go to daycare and started attending kindergarten. None of his former playmates were there, but when he asked his teacher who his new classmates were, she looks confused. "Why Henry, don't you remember them from daycare?" He didn't. When he told his mother about it, she told him they had been with him in daycare. One afternoon after school, Henry went back to the daycare and saw his former playmates, who were still the same.

Everyone in kindergarten was five and they were still five when Henry turned six.

Henry was a pretty intelligent boy for his age and it didn't take long for him to notice the pattern. On his first day of the first grade, he asked his new teacher, "Who are all these kids? I've never seen them before."

And just like his previous teacher, the first grade teacher looks confused and said, "What are you talking about Henry? You have known and them your entire life; they were with you in daycare and in kindergarten."

"No they weren't!" Henry argued. He scanned the faces of his classmates again, now more certain than ever that he didn't know who they were. "I remember being in kindergarten last year and none of them were there."

Henry began to list of the children who had been in kindergarten with him, but his teacher shook her head. "Henry, that's this year's kindergarten class, not last year's. You got them mixed up."

"But...but I remember-"

His teacher didn't let him finish, "Memories aren't always reliable, especially at this age. Now please stop causing a scene. You're disrupting the other students."

Henry wanted to protest, but he was confused and unsure. Surely he couldn't have been wrong about an entire year of his life? He only been alive for six years, how could he have gotten them all mixed up? Maybe if he was really old like Granny he would - she probably had a lot of years to remember - but he wasn't. He was six year old and he couldn't have gotten it wrong.

From then on Henry was determined to get things straight. The same thing happened when he entered the second grade, and by now he was smart enough not to point out that he didn't know these new classmates either. Before he had been a pretty outgoing boy, but now he didn't see the point in trying to make friends with anyone. He will be forced to move up another grade while they stayed behind, and then they would act like they had never met him before.

A little while before winter break, one of the other teachers pulled him aside during recess. It was Miss Blanchard, the fifth-grade teacher. He had seen her around school, but had never really talked to her before. She looked concerned, but her eyes were warm and friendly. She seemed trustworthy and approachable.

"Hi Henry, can we talk?"

"Sure." He was not sure what she wanted to talk about, but he assumed he was in trouble for something.

"I've just noticed that you don't seem to like your friends anymore. Is something wrong?" Miss Blanchard asked, looking kind and concerned.

Henry shrugged, "They're not really my friends. And they're just gonna forget about me next year."

Miss Blanchard frowned, "Are they upset with you over something."

"No, they just can't remember me." Henry sighed in resignation. "There's no point in making friends."

"But don't you think you'll be lonely if you don't have friends? You should at least try to get along with the other children, and I'm sure you'll find someone who'll still want to be friends with you next year."

Henry didn't know how to explain to Miss Blanchard that nothing he did would change the fact that the other kids wouldn't remember him. "Am I going to be in the same class as them next year?"

Miss Blanchard blinked, "Of course you are Henry. Just like you were in the same class as them last year."

Tears of frustration blurred his eyesight. He didn't understand! He was the only kid in the school - maybe in the whole town - who was growing up, but nobody else seemed to notice it. Or maybe everyone else was right and he was wrong? Had he always been in a class with his current classmates, but kept remembering it incorrectly? Was there something wrong with his brain?

"Oh Henry," Miss Blanchard wrapped her arms around him, pressing his face into the shoulder of her thick, white sweater. One hand rested on the back of his head, cradling it. "What's wrong? Was it something I said."

He felt warm and safe in her embrace, but he felt a little embarrassed crying in a teacher's arms at recess. Henry reluctantly pushed Miss Blanchard away. "Forget it, it's stupid."

"Henry," Miss Blanchard said firmly. "Your feelings are not stupid. You can tell me anything."

Henry looked around, hoping this other kids weren't paying attention, then told Miss Blanchard in a half-scared whispered, "I think I might be crazy."

Miss Blanchard told his mom what he said, but at first his mom refused to believe that there is anything wrong with him. Henry wasn't quite sure how to feel about that.

After that day, Henry started keeping track of everything. He asked random people who old they were, what their childhoods were like, anything about the past. He wrote down each vague answer in one of many notebooks, hoping to find something that could explain why time didn't work right in Storybrooke. Henry kept it up for almost two years, but eventually gave up and threw out all his notebooks. He wasn't getting anywhere.

His mother seems to be in charge of everything, so Henry starts to wonder if maybe she has the answers. She usually leaves him home alone on Saturdays to go to a bunch of dumb meetings, so Henry takes that time to snoop around her office. Mostly he just finds a bunch of legal documents, stuff that has to do with being the mayor.

One Saturday, he finds a briefcase tucked away in his mother's closet. Instead of mayor stuff, it's hospital documents for a woman named Emma Swan, who had a baby in Storybrooke. The name isn't familiar, but Henry doesn't pay it much mind; he just assumes it's someone in town. Before he can look at the documents more closely, he hears his mother pull into the driveway, so he scrambles to put everything back and race to the kitchen, to pretend he was getting a snack.

The following week, Henry looked for the briefcase again, but it was gone. When his mother came home from work early that Saturday, she made him help her make dinner and had a talk with him.

"You're adopted," she told him nervously.

Henry was a little startled, "Adopted? Like Superman?"

Mom smiled a little, "Yes, except I didn't find you in an alien spaceship. The woman who gave birth to you didn't want you, so she left you."

That made Henry feel weird in a bad way, "Why not?"

"Because she was a bad person," Regina took hold of his little chin, a gentle, affectionate gesture. "And because she couldn't see how wonderful and special you are, and wasn't able to love you. Well, her loss is my gain. I'm so lucky I got the chance to be your mom, and I'm glad I was able to give you a better than you would have if I hadn't adopted you."

Henry thinks his mom might be trying to reassure him, but it just makes him feel worse. "I can still call you 'Mom', though."

"Sweetheart, of course. I'm your real mom, because I loved you and took care of you. I know this might be upsetting to hear, but I thought you deserved to know the truth. It's better that you find out from me than anyone else."

Henry suddenly wondered if she knew that he find the briefcase, but he was too nervous and upset to ask. He didn't remember much about what was in it, just the name Emma Swan. It doesn't take long for him to put together that Emma Swan was the woman who gave him up. Why else would his mom have her hospital records. He feels uneasy when he thinks of Emma. Sometimes he wonders if she forgot about him, if she still thinks of him as something unimportant, second-rate, or embarrassing. The thought made him feel like he was all those things.

As he got older, he didn't get along with his mother as well as he used to. He started getting tired of her always leaving him home alone, even though he knew it was for work. Why does she have to work on a Saturday, though? She was really nasty to everyone else in town. She usually wasn't that bad to Henry himself, but regardless she wasn't an easy person to know, let alone live with. She was especially awful Miss Blanchard. Henry doesn't understand why, but his mother hated Miss Blanchard with a burning passion. Henry thought Miss Blanchard was one of the few people who really understood him, and considered her one of his special friends. He even told her about the castle by the sea that he would spent hours in. He never told his mother about the castle because he was afraid she would forbid him from going there.

Even as Henry kept feeling worse about himself and his life, his mom kept acting as though everything was just fine. Maybe things were fine for her, but they certainly warrants for Henry. He wished that she would take his problems seriously, but she would always just say that he was growing up and being moody was a normal part of being a little boy. He would grow out of it, she would say, but he didn't. Eventually his relationship with his mother got so bad, that she could no longer pretend everything was okay.

When he was eight years old, his mom began sending him to Dr. Hopper, the only therapist in Storybrooke. Henry thought that Dr. Hopper was a pretty nice guy, but he didn't like the fact that Dr. Hopper mostly seem to care about making him get along with his mother. He had all sorts of confusing, negative emotions swelling around inside him, emotions that he couldn't me more understand, but Dr. Hopper seemed sure that getting along with his mom would make those feelings go away. Henry wasn't too sure about that.

What made it worse was that he was no closer to figuring out why he was different or white time didn't move in the town. He was about to give up and just accept that he was crazy, but when he turned ten years old, Miss Blanchard gave him a strange book that she had found while cleaning out her closet. It was a beautiful old book of fairy tales, with bright illustrations on many of the pages.

Henry thanked her for the book, and began going through it carefully. To his amazement, many of the characters in the story resembled people that he knew in real life. From the way they acted in the story to the lifelike pictures that work included, Henry could not shake the feeling that he was reading about the other people in town. It felt like an odd coincidence at first, but as he kept reading it really started to trouble him. Only, he was not in the story. The Evil Queen's father had the same name as him, but that was it; his mother had once mentioned that she named him after her father.

When Henry read about the curse, suddenly everything made sense. The curse explained why Storybrooke was so strange. And if he wasn't from the book, if he was from the real world and not the storybook world, that would also explain why he was the only one aging. He turned to the last page of the book, a full-page drawing of Snow White and Prince Charming's daughter, the baby girl sent to the real life to make sure the curse was broken.

Princess Emma.

The name brought back his uncomfortable memories of finding out that he was adopted, that his birth mother had grown him away because she didn't want him. To be honest one from his mother's records be the same Emma? If so did that mean that he would have to get help from a woman who wanted nothing to do with him? Basalt made Henry queasy, but he's doing push that aside. If Emma was supposed to be the hero of the story, she couldn't have been as bad as his mother told him. Maybe if he helped her break the curse, she would change her mind and want to be his mom again. And then he wouldn't be stuck living with Regina anymore.

From then on Henry made it his mission to find Emma Swan and help her break the curse. The book became his lifeline. He could already see the story playing out in his mind. He would find Emma and bring her to Storybrooke. Maybe she wouldn't be happy at first or maybe she wouldn't believe him. That was normal; a lot of heroes didn't believe at first. He would just have to stay strong and work hard to convince her of the truth. Once he did that, and Emma broke the curse, everything would be the way it ought to be. The Evil Queen would be vanquished, Emma would reunite with her parents, and he would be a hero.

For the first time in as long as Henry would remember, he felt hope.

It took a while to put the pieces together and find the Emma Swan he was looking for, but he eventually did find her living in Boston. Henry skipped school and, without telling anyone what he was planning to do so his mother wouldn't find out, walked to the nearest bus station. He was so excited about Emma, his birth mother and the hero of his dreams, that he couldn't imagine anything going wrong. From the bus station, he took a taxi to Emma's apartment, and a kindly old woman let him inside. He knocked on the door, sure that she was just on the other side of the door.

He couldn't stop himself from smiling as she opened the door, looking slightly confused. She was beautiful, though she didn't really look like him. Henry just assumed that he took after his father. Oh, he hadn't thought about his father. He'd just have to ask her about him later.

"Can I help you?" Emma asked.

Henry was so happy to hear her voice, he had to stop himself from hugging her. "Are you Emma Swan?"

"Yeah? Who are you?"

"I'm your son." Henry could tell from the way her expression quickly changed that she was about to slam the door in his face. He quickly ran into the apartment. If he could just get her to talk to him, if he just got a chance to convince her...

"Hey, wait. I don't have a son."

"Ten years ago, did you give a baby boy up for adoption?"

"No."

The one little world turned everything upside. Suddenly, his certainty began to dissipate. He thought he had finally figured it out, that his life finally made sense. Had he gotten the wrong Emma Swan? "A-are you sure?"

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure I would know if I placed a baby for adoption. I'm sorry that wasn't the answer you were looking for." Emma's face was so kind and sympathetic, it filled Henry with embarrassment.

"But it has to be you. That's the only way any of this makes sense." Henry said. That's the only way I know I'm not crazy, he didn't say.

"And what exactly is 'this', kid?" Emma asked.

Henry reminded himself to stay calm. The hero doesn't always believe, that happened all the time in stories. He just had to convince her. "It's hard to explain. I don't think you're ready to hear the whole truth, not yet at least." He begged her to come back to Storybrooke with him, even threatened to tell the police she kidnapped him (he wouldn't actually do something like that; he didn't want to her get in trouble).

"Please," he begged, hating how desperate and needy he sounded, "Come home with me."

Emma seemed to think about long and hard about. Finally, she said that words that reignited Henry's hope. "Okay. Where's home?"