The name of the street was gone.
Sera noticed it the way she noticed all her forgettings: not as an alarm but as a clearing. The way you notice a room after furniture has been moved out. The house was still there, clearly, she could see it: the grey render, the sloped front garden, the particular shade of that front door, which was red. She had grown up in that house. She simply could not remember what the street was called.
She was standing at the kitchen counter with her coffee going cold. It was an ordinary Thursday.
Inge had been keeping a list. Sera knew this because she had seen the note-taking at the last two appointments, Inge's phone always face-up on her knee, her daughter's face doing the particular thing it did when she was managing alarm. The list was full of things Sera had forgotten: names, places, dates, the word for something she had wanted at a shop.
What the list did not capture was what Sera noticed. Which was that the forgettings had a pattern.
Not random. Something like a tide.
She had lost the names of colleagues from the job she'd left at fifty. She had lost three years of a friendship that had ended badly. She had lost the details of a period she had once described, to a therapist, as the worst year of her life. Not the events, not the understanding she had reached about them. The weight around them.
What she was keeping: the house with the red door. Her daughters. The smell of her mother's coat. The sensation of being in water, which she associated with a summer when she was seven and which had no context she could name but was still entirely hers.
The phone rang. Inge.
Sera looked at the screen. Her daughter's face, from the photo taken at a birthday two years ago, laughing at something Sera no longer remembered, the laugh still real.
She let it ring.
She would call back. She just needed another minute with the house on the street whose name had gone, with the red door, with the front garden's slope, with whatever the forgetting was making room for.