✧ Scene: Confrontation — “You Gave Me Amnesia”

The paper trembled slightly in his hand.

Not from fear — from fury.

Aaric walked through the old Cambridge house like a man seeing it for the first time. The heavy furniture, the clinical precision of the bookshelves, the silence thick as dust — all of it suddenly felt smug. Complicit.

He found his father in the study, seated by the fire with a glass of something aged, the Times Literary Supplement folded neatly beside him.

Aaric didn’t wait.

He thrust the printed page forward. “Did you know this?”

His father glanced at it. Then at Aaric’s face — calm, always calm, but now measured with caution.

“You’ll need to be more specific.”

Aaric stepped forward, voice low but trembling.
“This manuscript was catalogued under your faculty’s oversight. Fourteenth-century Andalusi poetry. Dismissed as irrelevant. But it’s not just history. It’s our family.”

His father’s eyes flicked back to the page, then away.

“There are many such fragments. You’re making a leap.”

“Don’t,” Aaric cut in. “Don’t pretend this is academic.” His voice cracked. “She wrote in Arabic. She hid it in Latin. The notes match her script. Her blood is ours. Did you know?”

Silence.

Then his father set the glass down and leaned back slowly.

“Your grandmother was… spirited. I respected her. But I chose not to indulge her fantasies. It was better for everyone that way.”

Aaric stood still.
Indulge?

He heard the word echo inside him like a crack in stone.

“Indulge her?” he repeated, almost whispering. “You mean… her faith? Her memory? Her language?”

His father didn’t meet his eyes.
“She was trying to hold onto something long gone.”

“No.” Aaric’s voice sharpened. “She was trying to remember something you buried.”

The silence turned suffocating.

“So let me understand,” Aaric pressed. “She didn’t ask for money. She didn’t ask for status. She tried to preserve a truth about who we are — and you dismissed it as indulgence.”

His father’s jaw clenched.

“She would have made your life harder, Aaric. That kind of talk, that kind of history — it complicates things. I gave you clarity.”

Aaric laughed once — bitter, breathless.

“You didn’t give me clarity. You gave me amnesia. You raised me to believe our story began in the halls of British institutions. You erased your mother with your clarity.”

His father’s eyes flickered — not regret, just discomfort.

“I thought I was educated,” Aaric said, his voice breaking. “I thought we came from a line of thinkers — modern, rational. But she… she was the one who remembered. She carried the truth while you called it fantasy.”

He pulled the manuscript from his coat pocket and tossed it onto the table between them.

“That is not fantasy. That’s her handwriting. That’s our inheritance.”

His father opened his mouth, but Aaric was already walking away.

“You didn’t protect me. You hid me.”

At the doorway, he paused.

Quieter now. Wounded.
“And now I don’t even know who I am.”

He didn’t look back.
This time, he knew where he was going.