She typed one more line into Yaelp:
A woman sat in a dim room, surrounded by thousands of glass jars. She was older now, gray-haired, but her smile was the same.
“What you give cannot be taken back. What you take will cost you everything you remember of yourself.” Belinda Aka Bely Collection Yaelp Search
The screen flickered. Then it went dark.
Mara stood up. She grabbed her coat.
The cursor blinked on the empty search bar of — a deep-web search engine known for indexing abandoned digital archives, forgotten social media profiles, and the so-called “ghost collections” of the early internet. No one used Yaelp for ordinary things. You used it when you were looking for someone who had tried very hard to disappear.
She held up a small blue ribbon.
The third result was a blog post titled “The Bely Collection Curse.” Anonymous commenters claimed that anyone who tried to reclaim an object they’d given to Belinda would suffer a strange fate: they would forget not just the original memory, but entire years of their lives.