The vial lay empty on the passenger seat. She picked it up, turned it over in her fingers. There was no label, no instructions. Just a small hand-drawn sun on the cork, faded now.

Mia had always thought of herself as someone who lived in full color. She was a painter, after all—her life a canvas slathered in ochre sunsets, cobalt anxieties, vermillion desires. But that was before the split. Before the blackout. Before everything she knew about herself was scraped raw.

The night stretched on, dark and full of ordinary horrors and ordinary graces. And Mia, for the first time, did not look away.

That second Mia—the blacked-out Mia—did not remember things linearly. She became them.