Each is tiny, plausible, barely a change at all.

But run the process for six months, retell the story to yourself a few hundred times, each version a hair kinder to you than the last, and you arrive, without ever having consciously lied, at a memory that is the precise opposite of what occurred — a memory in which the man who walked away first has become the man who was left.

My phone had preserved, in a folder I did not know existed, the one thing my mind could not edit: Rosalie’s own voice, saying the very words, on the day itself.

And playing it was like being handed a photograph of an event I would have sworn, on my life, had happened another way entirely.