This was a statistical impossibility that bordered on the absurd. The probability of such a resemblance occurring by chance was so infinitesimally small that it might as well be zero. The probability of that resemblance appearing in a portrait from the eighteenth century, a portrait that had somehow found its way into a box of artifacts delivered to his office on the same day he was spiralling over a woman with ancient eyes—

  No.

  No, this was impossible. This was a trick. Someone had staged this—planted this here, engineered this moment to—to what? Drive him mad? Manipulate him into some action he wouldn't otherwise take? It was the only logical explanation, the only explanation that fit within the framework of reality as he understood it.

  But who? And why? And how could anyone have known about the dreams, about the visions, about the way her face had haunted him since childhood?

  He snatched the portrait back up, his hands trembling so violently that he nearly dropped it again. He turned it over, searching for something, anything, that would explain this.

  On the back, in faded ink: "Toujours à toi. 1792."

  Forever yours.

  The words hit him like a physical blow. Forever yours. Someone had written those words, about two hundred and thirty years ago, to accompany this portrait of a woman who looked exactly like the stranger who had followed him through a park and touched his face with hands that felt like coming home.

  He found the curatorial card, a small slip of paper that had been tucked behind the portrait in its foam nest. His eyes scanned the text, hungry for information, for context, for anything that would make this make sense.

  Subject: Unknown. Found among the effects of a minor French aristocrat, Comte de Valois, guillotined in 1793. The artist is unidentified. The subject is believed to be a fictional ideal or a lost love, as no records match her likeness. Note the anachronistic depth and character in the rendering of the eyes, unusual for the period's portraiture which favored flattering superficiality.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Fictional. Lost love.

  The words burned in his mind like acid. Fictional. Lost love. A woman who never existed, or a woman whose existence had been erased so completely that no records remained. A woman whose eyes held depths that eighteenth-century portraitists weren't supposed to be able to paint.

  He stared at the face in the portrait. He traced the curve of her jaw with his thumb, feeling the raised surface of the paint beneath the clouded glass. He studied the arch of her brow, the set of her mouth, the small mole beside her left eye that he had noticed on the woman in the park and dismissed as coincidence.

  They were the same.

  Not similar. Not reminiscent. The same.

  The same curve. The same arch. The same mole. The same profound, weary soul looking out from a face that should have been dust for over two centuries. The same eyes that had looked at him across a crowded coffee shop and made him forget how to breathe.

  The ghost wasn't just in his mind. It was here, in his hand, sealed in a locket from the Reign of Terror. A physical object, verifiable and real, that connected this impossible woman to a life he had apparently lived before his own existence began.

  A sound escaped him—something between a laugh and a sob. He pressed his fist to his mouth, trying to contain it, trying to contain any of what was happening inside him. His body was shaking now, great tremors that ran through him like earthquakes, and he couldn't stop them, couldn't control them, couldn't do anything but stand there and feel the foundations of his reality crumble to dust.

  He had known her before.

  The thought detonated in his mind like a bomb, shattering everything in its blast radius. Cause and effect. Logic and reason. The orderly progression of a single, linear existence—all of it, gone. Obliterated by a two-inch painting and the woman it depicted.

  Reincarnation was impossible. Past lives were the stuff of mythology, of fairy tales, of the very pre-Axial Age nonsense that girl studied. They belonged to the same category as astrology and alchemy and all the other primitive attempts to understand a world that could only truly be comprehended through science and data.

  And yet.

  And yet here he stood, holding proof that his rational, ordered worldview was a lie.