Four months after Maverick died, Barnaby got back his first memory—well, the first memory he wasn't actively trying to uncover—of crying after school because he'd messed up a math problem.

He immediately wrote it down.

As he did the next one, and the next, and all the ones after that—uncovering the bits of himself that had been stolen away because they were inconvenient and slowly, carefully putting them back together, piecing together the patchwork of who he had been and fitting it with who he was becoming now, with no one touching his memories but himself.