Felix

Felix was harder to convince than Jonah had expected, not because Felix was unobservant, but because Felix was loyal in a particular stubborn way and did not like what they were suggesting.

"You are saying she is not Priya," Felix said. They were in Felix's garden, the shed at the bottom visible behind him, the autumn afternoon going dark around them.

"We are saying something seems wrong," Suki said carefully.

"Something seems wrong because she has been away for two years and people change," Felix said. "She is twelve. We are all different than we were at ten."

"She remembered the tin box was under the floorboard," Jonah said.

"Because she put things in it," Felix said. "She was there when we buried it."

"She did not know what was inside," Suki said.

"She said she did not remember. That is different from not knowing." Felix looked at them both. "She is my friend. She has been my friend since we were seven. I am not going to treat her like she is something wrong just because she seems a bit different after two years away."

Jonah and Suki looked at each other.

"Okay," Jonah said. "What if we just show her the photograph? Openly, not as a test. Just say we found it and we thought she would like to see it. And we watch her face."

Felix considered this. "That is not horrible," he said. "That is just showing her a photograph."

"Yes," Jonah said.

"Fine," Felix said. He went to the shed and they heard the floorboard lift and the tin box open and then he came back with the photograph.

The four of them. Summer. The garden of the old house two streets away where they used to play. Priya in the middle, laughing, her arm around Suki, Jonah and Felix on either side, everyone squinting slightly into the sun.

The next day Felix showed Priya the photograph at lunch.

Jonah watched her face.

She looked at the photograph for a long time. Her expression was right. Nostalgic, warm, the right kind of smile for a photograph from two years ago. She said the right things: that she remembered that day, that she remembered the game they had been playing before Jonah's mum took the photo, that she missed the old house.

All of it correct. All of it Priya.

Except that her eyes, while she was talking, were not on the photograph.

They were on Jonah.

Specifically on Jonah's face. Watching him. Watching him watch her.

She knew she was being tested. He was certain of it. And she had passed, again, perfectly, and she knew that too, and she was looking at him with an expression he could not name, steady and patient and not quite warm.

He looked away first.

He thought about it again on Tuesday evening, lying on his bed with the ceiling above him and the sounds of the house around him. He thought about the word he kept coming back to. Studied. She had studied how to be Priya. She had done it very well. She had done it well enough that Felix, who had known Priya for five years, noticed nothing wrong.

He thought about what that meant. The effort of it. Why something would go to that effort.

He did not find a good answer.

That evening he sat at his desk and tried to do homework and could not concentrate and stared at the wall instead. He thought about the photograph test. He thought about the way she had answered every question correctly, fluently, without hesitation, except for the half-second pause before the tin box and the longer pause before she said she did not remember what was inside.

He thought about pauses. What a pause meant. Whether a pause was the gap where memory was supposed to be or the gap where something was deciding what to say.