"Can I ask you something?"
It was a beautiful morning, chilly but bright, and she was walking with Rosie, taking Noah to daycare. They were moving down the sidewalk together, Noah in the middle with Rosie and Olivia flanking him, each of them holding one of his little hands. After the unsettling darkness of the night Olivia felt relieved to find herself once more in the daylight, but the questions her late night conversation with Malcolm had raised would not give her peace.
"Of course," Rosie answered easily. She really seemed like such a nice woman.
"How well do you know Malcolm?"
"As well as you can know anybody, I guess," Rosie answered. "He's an old friend of my husband's. They started some tech company - don't ask me what they did, I couldn't explain it if I tried - and sold it a few years back for just an outrageous amount of money. We all retired, but we stayed friends. Malcolm golfs with my husband, he comes by for dinner every now and then. We go on trips together. I just adored his wife, you know, it was so sad when we lost her."
He can't be that bad, can he? Olivia wondered. If Rosie was so nice, and she had known Malcolm for so long, and she thought he was a good man, then surely he must have been. Right?
"Does it make you nervous, staying alone with him?" Rosie asked in a voice dripping with concern, as if she had read between the lines of Olivia's simple question, and recognized the problem at once. "You really don't have anything to worry about, but if you'd rather I stayed with you at night, I could ask my husband -"
"No," Olivia cut her off quickly, "no, that's ok."
Maybe having Rosie stay the night instead of Malcolm might make Olivia feel a little more comfortable, but she didn't want Malcolm to know she was uncomfortable. She didn't want to hurt his feelings, and besides, she had so few friends. She didn't want to lose one just because she couldn't remember sleeping with him. And she really, really didn't want to tell Rosie about that, Rosie who adored Malcolm's dead wife and might not have any idea what Olivia and Malcolm had been getting up to before the accident.
"I know it must feel a little strange having a man you don't remember in your house, but I promise you're in good hands with Malcolm. He'll take good care of you. He'll keep you safe."
Rosie seemed like such a nice woman, and so Olivia chose to believe her. Or at least, she chose to behave as if she did. If she still had her reservations, she wasn't about to mention them now. There was still so much - too much - she didn't know, and she didn't want to do anything she couldn't take back, not until she had a little more information to work with. Something in her gut warned her to be suspicious of Malcolm, but how could she trust her instincts, when she didn't remember if they'd ever been right before? What were her instincts even based on, really?
"It's fine," Olivia said. "We're all gonna be just fine."
"All right, let's see what we've got," Malcolm said cheerily, and then he began to empty out the trash bags they'd brought home from the police station.
Olivia'd spent the morning with Rosie, and as nice as it was having the other woman around she was beginning to wish they'd just leave her alone, just for a little while, just long enough for her to begin to explore her own life, on her own terms. Malcolm came to collect her around noon, drove her straight to the impound lot where her ruined car was waiting to be hauled off and scrapped, stood beside her while she signed a novel's worth of paperwork and finally claimed the contents of her car.
And now they were in her house, Noah's carseat, surprisingly undamaged by the accident, left in the foyer and two big black trash bags worth of stuff spread out across her living room floor.
None of it was particularly remarkable; there was the phone, of course, but Malcolm said it needed to charge, and while it did they went through the rest of it. Chapstick and a hairbrush, lipstick and mascara, several dollars' worth of loose change. Blankets and jumper cables, water bottles and Kleenex. A keychain with two keys on it, one that looked like the housekey Malcolm used to unlock her front door and a smaller silver key she didn't recognize. There was a notebook she wanted to examine later, and several cables she didn't quite understand, and a necklace.
"What is that?" Malcolm asked when he noticed her running her thumb across the face of the strange silver pendant, its chain dangling over her wrist.
"This looks like it means something," she answered. "But I don't know what it is. Do you recognize it?"
She handed it over because she felt she must; she didn't want to give up anything that was hers, didn't love the idea of Malcolm touching her things, but she was curious, too, and right now he was her only hope of answers.
"It's a saint's medallion," Malcolm said as he took it, examining it closely. "It's a Catholic thing. When you go through confirmation you have to choose your confirmation name. The name of one of the saints. It's supposed to be a saint you identify with but most of the time when people are confirmed they're just kids, and kids just like to pick something that sounds cool. A lot of people wear necklaces like this with their saint on them, or just a saint they like for whatever reason. This one is Saint Jude."
Olivia only understood about half of what he'd just said, but she was hanging on his every word regardless.
"Who's Saint Jude?" she asked.
"Patron saint of lost causes," Malcolm said, and then he handed the necklace back to her.
"That sounds…sad." Once more she ran her thumb over the image of the saint inscribed on the medallion, wondering. Was she a lost cause? Was the necklace even hers?
"Patron saint of cops, too, I think," Malcolm suggested helpfully. "Some of them, at least. Maybe that's why you have it. I don't think you were particularly religious. I know Ed wasn't, he hated the Catholic church."
He said church and the image of the little New Testament Olivia'd found in her bedside table flitted through her mind. Those things were connected, weren't they? That little book, it had something to do with the church, and so did the necklace, and she kept them both close to hand. She kept El's picture in the book. Maybe he had something to do with church, too. Maybe she was more religious than Malcolm knew. The medallion only raised more questions, and what she wanted just now was answers, and so she decided to put her curiosity about the necklace aside for the moment.
"Do you think the phone's ready now?" she asked, and as she did she carefully hung the medallion around her neck. She didn't know Saint Jude and she didn't know why she had a necklace with his image on it, but she liked the weight of it around her neck. The patron saint of lost causes - and cops, some of them - sounded like someone who could help her, and she'd take all the help she could get.
"Yeah, I think it'll work for a few minutes at least. Let me grab it." Malcolm shuffled across the room and retrieved the phone from where he'd left it, and then handed it back to her.
"Touch this button on the side," he said, guiding her hand, "and the screen should light up."
It did, just like he said; a picture of Noah, beaming, flashed across the screen, the date and time written at the top. And then something else flashed across the screen, and Malcolm frowned.
"It wants a passcode," he said. "It'll be four numbers. It's gotta be something important to you, something you'd remember."
But Olivia didn't remember anything at all.
"Shit," she muttered.
Noah was only in daycare until 3:00, and Rosie would be bringing him home any minute now, and Olivia wanted to focus on her son while he was with her, didn't want to spend precious time pouring over the mystery of the phone when she should have been getting to know her child instead. But she needed the phone; there would be names, and pictures, and messages stored there, the answers to so many of her questions. All of them, maybe. But she needed four digits to access it, and she didn't have any.
"Well, let's think," Malcolm said. "Could be a birthday, you know, the month and the day. Could be your anniversary. We can try a few different combinations before it locks us out."
"Wait, if it locks us out -"
"Just for a minute. It won't brick the phone."
"Brick the -"
"Make it useless," he explained. "We can figure this out, Olivia."
But she didn't know the information he was looking for. Didn't know her birthday, or her son's, or her husband's, didn't know her anniversary. It was maddening, the endless things of she didn't know, the hopelessness she felt when confronted with the sheer scope of what she'd lost.
Malcolm knew, though.
"Here we go," he said, taking the phone. "Let's try your birthday."
But that didn't work. Neither did Ed's birthday, or Noah's, and Malcoml didn't know when she'd gotten married. They weren't getting anywhere at all, and frustration like bile rose in the back of her throat.
Think, she told herself. Just think. Four numbers.
She stared hopelessly around the living room, searching her brain desperately, but no answer came to her. There was just nothing, a vast, endless sea of nothing. As she struggled to come up with some solution to the problem in front of her she began to stare, hard, at the clock on above the sofa. A big round clock, the numbers 1 through 12 in a ring around its edge. 1, 2, 3, she followed the numbers with her eyes, 4, 5, 6 -
6.
And then, like a bolt of lighting, it struck her, a window in her mind shattering open.
"Try 6-3-1-3," she said quickly, eagerly.
Malcolm shot her a confused sort of look - and she couldn't blame him for that, really, because she did not understand herself where this stroke of inspiration had come from or what it meant - and then did as she asked.
"Huh," he said. "What do you know? It worked."
Finally. Finally, finally, she'd remembered something, done something right. If that memory could come back to her, surely everything else would, too, with time. Maybe she wasn't such a lost cause, after all, or maybe Saint Jude had decided to help her. Whatever the reason, she had remembered something, and the remembering filled her with a giddy sort of happiness, with so much relief that a wide, brilliant smile split across her face, a smile so big she ached with it.
"You did it," Malcolm said, his smile nearly as big as hers. "Shit, Olivia, you remembered something!"
"I did," she answered. "I did." I remembered.
"Holy shit," Malcolm swore again, delighted, and then he reached for her, pulled her tight to him in a warm, impulsive hug, and she wrapped her arms around him and clung to him, too full of joy, full of hope to mistrust him.