Free True by Michael Cordy Page A

of the States and is designed to give the user a euphoric high that makes them see everyone as their friend -- hence the name. It has an interesting side-effect, though. It causes temporary face-blindness.
    'Colleagues in the States isolated and extracted the relevant components to create a drug that only induces the side-effect.' She tapped the canister. 'Assuming our ethics committee gives us the go-ahead, we plan to use these research tablets on healthy volunteers. By monitoring their brain activity while the temporary prosopagnosia kicks in and then recedes, we hope to understand better what switches are being triggered in the brain. I've tried the drug myself and the best way of describing the experience was that individual faces became unrecognizable. I could still work out who some familiar people were by their hair colour and clothing, but the overall pattern of their faces meant nothing to me. This might help you understand.' She reached into a drawer in her desk, pulled out four small pebbles and stood them on the desk. 'Suppose these pebbles have names -- Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.' She waited a moment then jumbled them up, and returned three to the drawer. She pointed to the remaining pebble. 'Can you tell me this one's name?'
    The father shrugged. 'No. They all look the same.'
    'It's Mark.' Isabella put the other pebbles back on the table. 'Mark is slightly bigger and bluer than the others, with a distinctive crack on the side. These pebbles are as different from each other as human faces are, but we're not programmed to recognize them as a cohesive whole. The problem for people with prosopagnosia is that human faces look as indistinguishable to them as pebbles do to the rest of us.
    "The point is, the condition may be frustrating and embarrassing, but it's not debilitating. Many people born with mild prosopagnosia don't even realize they have it. They live perfecdy good lives thinking they have a poor memory for faces - although prosopagnosia has nothing to do with memory. I can tell you with confidence that Sofia will learn to cope. And, trust me, so will you.'
    Only when Isabella had answered Sofia's parents' remaining questions and walked them back to Reception did she check her watch again. Before she left for her holiday she had to complete her handovers. She would have to hurry, but she still had time to get into and out of the apartment before he returned.
    LEO'S APARTMENT, WHICH HAD BEEN ISABELLA'S HOME UNTIL A FEW weeks ago, was near Corso Italia on the southern side of Milan. She still had the keys. She had lived there for almost a year and, despite her efforts to remain detached, was so preoccupied with memories that she didn't notice the tall blond man watching her from the other side of the road. She stepped into the cool of the familiar lobby and took the lift to the fourth floor. When she unlocked the door to the apartment she was shocked by how completely the interior had been transformed.
    The hall, which had boasted a battered leather chair, a cluttered desk, posters from the Uffizi and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, was now an essay in minimalism. The freshly painted walls were uniformly off-white and unadorned. The wooden floor had been polished so it gleamed and the only piece of furniture was a single stylish glass table, on which stood a telephone and a crystal vase of white lilies; their orange stamens had been cut off so that they couldn't stain anything that might brush against them. The only untidy features were Isabella's guitar and two cardboard packing cases by the door to the lounge; even the boxes had been taped shut and arranged like a work of art. A scribbled yellow Post-it note was stuck to one: Tzzy. Giovanna kindly packed all your belongings for you. Please leave your keys on die hall table when you leave. Hope we can stay friends. Leo.'
    Isabella felt hollow inside when she looked at the old guitar that had once belonged to her mother, and the two boxes, which