The next morning we took her to the best neurologist in the city, and after a long day of scans and evaluations, he sat us down and gave the lost thing a name.

Psychogenic amnesia, he called it — a mind so overwhelmed by physical and emotional trauma, twenty years ago, that it had sealed away everything that came before, the way a body walls off a wound too deep to leave open.

Her past was not gone, he believed.

It was locked.

“Do not try to force it,” he told us, and he was kind but firm about this.

“Do not sit her down with photographs and demand that she remember.