"I want you to finish your spell."

Miriel finds her. "Can you give me my memories back now?"

"It's that time," agrees Bella. And they find a suitable private room and the memories come back.

"I can't do this again," she says. "It's crushing Fëanáro. He's perceptive enough to know something is up, but not what, and so he's concluded that I secretly don't love him and he's desperately unhappy about it."

"...I mean, I can confirm anything you want to tell him given your permission, if you can think of anything that would help -?"

"I don't think he'll believe you either. I love him. I want everything to be okay. I don't know what to do - maybe if I had died he'd have gotten over it faster -"

"He might believe me... I have a guess about a spell that might help, but even when I get my time sense back where it belongs I can't expect to have it done in less than several Years, and I can't be sure it would even work."

"If you tell him that you think there's a solution, maybe that'll help him wait. What are you thinking of?"

So Bella explains the atonement thing and its usual applications and how it's divine magic and she hasn't gotten anywhere near divine magic and may or may not be able to arcanely replicate it.

She nods. "Still. If he's happier."

"...if you were dead? I mean - do you think Mandos could fix you better than the patch job I've been doing -? Nobody's been reembodied yet though..."

"I don't think Mandos could fix me. I don't want to die. I want whatever's best for my son and I'm not sure what that is and I only have the resources to try to guess once a month and I feel the tiredness and pain setting in almost immediately."

"...want a coffee thing?"

"Sure. Thank you."

Bella coffee-things. "We could try doing this more often - I can fly now, coming into Tirion every two weeks or something wouldn't set me back that much. If more accumulated time to think might help."

"It might. Once you have your spell and can return to the city, we could do it every week, if I think there's a solution I'll stumble on with enough time -"

"Yeah. I can just - if it's physical pain I can maybe block that off like I can fix headaches, how far would that get you...?"

"The pain's not really the problem, the problem is that I forget what I want, what I care about - no, I don't forget, I just stop caring, and I don't have enough information without the feeling of caring to evaluate different solutions. You know Fëanáro better than I do. What do you think he needs?"

"I - he needs a lot of things, he - I haven't actually seen you together while you're amnesiac because I steer clear of you then, what happens?"

"I ask him what he's working on - you have to understand, the missing memories are distressing, I spend a lot of time wondering what it is I'd want to forget, I haven't thought of the truth but I think of a lot of things, most of them awful - and he decides I don't really care, which isn't true but it is true that I'm grasping for straws because I do not remember his childhood and he's like a stranger to me."

"I'm not sure what exactly he's picking up on... um, he tends to externalize a lot of his self-esteem, what might be happening is that if he's not the most compelling thing in your life whenever he's around, and he can't be because you're fretting about what you forgot, he assumes it's because he's not interesting enough, I'm not sure he's actually capable of fully getting that the problem is that your mind's not working as it ought to..."

"So then he tries to get my full attention, by explaining how he hates me and you're much better," she says with a rueful smile, "which does work, I forget to worry about my memories then..."

"Ssssorry about that. It would usually be really irregular for a therapist to be treating somebody closely related to one of her friends, the advice on dealing with it is pretty much 'don't', I don't think this is why but it does mean there's no good way to disentangle it when there's nobody else to refer you to."

"I don't blame you. I don't blame anyone except myself; if I'd been there for Fëanáro he wouldn't have these insecurities in the first place."