The Version of You I Loved - Luca Aresu;Elizabeth Hurt

She volunteered to forget him. She didn't expect to find out why.

Chloe Vasquez is a memory researcher who wakes up inside a study she agreed to - but can no longer fully remember agreeing to. The procedure was supposed to be clean: a bilateral erasure, mutual, complete. Instead, she finds herself in a white room with a notebook that isn't hers, a phone that isn't private, and an archive of someone else's memories she's been given twelve days to navigate.

The someone else is Mark. He's upstairs. He wakes up every morning not knowing what he lost.

As Chloe rebuilds the full picture from fragments - modification logs with wrong dates, a half-finished entry in a blank book, one page of a four-page transcript - she begins to understand that what happened between them wasn't done to her. It was built with her. Two people protecting each other from opposite ends of the same problem, neither knowing what the other was doing.

The procedure failed because they both tried to stop it.

The question is whether it's too late to choose differently - and whether she can make that choice knowing it will probably cost her everything she's recovered.

The Version of You I Loved is a psychological sci-fi novel about memory, complicity, and the specific courage of choosing badly-odds on purpose. For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, Blake Crouch's Dark Matter, and Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police.

What you choose to forget says everything about what you couldn't keep.