I’m sure he will, but since he’s given it to me, I haven’t called him yet. I do keep it with me as I shuffle around the penthouse, clinging to it like it’s my lifeline. I’ve already brought too much trouble to his door. Unless it’s an emergency, I won’t bother him, though it’s nice to know someone cares.
He doesn’t just stop at giving me a phone. He also arranges a weekly meeting with a specialist who will work to help me regain my memories. When I flinched at the idea of leaving, Dallas assured me that it’s all online. In fact, while I’m still vulnerable, he prefers if I don’t leave the penthouse at all. The Fortress is too intimidating to even attempt to navigate, and since I don’t remember any of my time in Harmony Heights, I could easily get lost if I left the building.
That’s not all he suggests I do, either. Following my new doctor’s recommendation, Dallas insists that I shouldn’t go searching for the answers to my missing memories, either. Headmits that even showing off the pictures in his phone might’ve been more detrimental than helpful, and that I shouldn’t let my curiosity lead me to look up any social media or online information about me that I might find. It’s better if I let my memories return slowly, with the help of Dr. Brannigan, instead of stumbling on a trigger that might hurt me.
Remembering how it felt to discover that both of my parents basically abandoned me as soon as I was eighteen, I agreed with him—and Dr. Brannigan.
After all, he was the one who told me during our first session: “You’ll need patience. Trauma-based amnesia isn’t like flipping a switch. Your mind is protecting you.”
“From what?” I had asked.
“Who’s to say? But you should let the memories come back when they’re ready. Don’t force them. Ask questions only if you’re prepared for the answers.”
And, since I’m not, I stop asking questions about what happened to me.
I do.
Dallas doesn’t.
Every evening, after he returns home from work and eats dinner with me, the two of us sit together and he invites me to get to know my husband again. I want to know everything about Dallas, but one of the first things Ididlearn was the tell he has when I’m touching too close to a topic he doesn’t want to discuss. Only then, when I shut down the conversation for the night, does he take a turn—and all he wants to know is about the morning I had my accident.
I’m pretty sure he thinks that, if we can unravel justwhyI fell, my mind wouldn’t feel the need to be protected anymore. It’s a Catch-22. That accident is why I can’t remember anything, but if I can break through and remember anything about that day, I might as well remembereverything.
It all comes back to the hotel. The hotel, and the man I was with.
I know why he’s pushing this, but by the end of the week, I can’t hide my agitation. That night… everything I’ve learned tells me that I was at the Stanton hotel with a man who wasn’t Dallas. Who wasn’t my husband. Dallas repeatedly tells me that I shouldn’t be ashamed that I was out with another man because wewereseparated, but I can’t help myself.
And then, one night after I blurted out another apology, he just takes my hands and squeezes them enough that it would take effort to escape his hold.
“Don’t be sorry. Maybe I should’ve said this already, but I’m gonna make this perfectly clear. What happened before? Yeah, I want to know. If it was an accident… if he did something to you… fuck, yeah, I want to know. But I don’t care about what happened while we were separated beyond that. In fact, if I haven’t made it clear already, I don’t want to be separated anymore, Lucy. If you’re up to it, I’d be open to reconciling. No pressure or anything. But there it is.”
No pressure? If only.
I’ve seen the way he watches me when he thinks I’m looking elsewhere. The way he can’t seem to keep his hands to himself, always finding an excuse to touch me, but never with any expectation behind the caresses. Anything I need? Anything I want? He buys them, clicking ‘add to cart’ before I finish murmuring that the deodorant that Adrian’s wife picked up for me is making me break out under my arms.
I get a kiss to my forehead every night before he walks me to my bedroom, and a glass of water in case I’m thirsty. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think he’s open to reconciling with me.
Oh, no. I’m back to being Dallas’s wife, and I’m not complaining.
Not about that, at least. But the nightmares that begin on my seventh night in his penthouse?
Yeah. Those fuckingsuck.
Up until the first nightmare,I slept like the dead each night, even though I really didn’t expect to. I would curl up on my bed in my new room, sip some of my water, and try not to think about Dallas in his bedroom, so close, yet so far away. Every time I think I’ll be up all night, racking my brain for a sliver of memories or just because this is so weird. I feel like a stranger in someone else’s skin, like I’ve stolen their life and got all the benefits.
I’m not his Lucy. I’m not his baby. I’m not his wife… but tell that to Dallas.
Is it normal to have nightmares when you’re dealing with my dissociative amnesia? I’ll have to ask Dr. Brannigan during our next session, but at first I don’t even think what I’m experiencingarenightmares. They’re more like vague visions… fleeting emotions… half-formed scenes that vanish on the edge of me coming to again.
And then, suddenly, it’s so clear, it’s almost as though I’mlivingit?—
If you asked me where I am, I wouldn’t be able to give any details other than I’m in the living room of my childhood home. I see the smoke-stained walls, the sagging couch, the touches of decoration my mother put up before she decided that she couldn’t deal with being my father’s wife any longer. She took off, he was granted a divorce, and no one spoke about her ever again.
I hated living there after Mom was gone. Dad booted me on my eighteenth birthday when I refused to agree to marry some guy he picked out for me, and I’d been on my own ever since. It took him begging, pleading, then turning cold, threatening my boyfriend, telling me that heknew, thateveryoneknew, that if I didn’t come home again, I wouldn’t be the only one who paid.
I’m twenty-five. Too old to be afraid of my father, but it wasn’t only Dad who ordered me to his home…
There are two men sitting on the couch. Dad is one of them. The other is a good ten years older than me, with slicked-back dark hair, black eyes, and a slight curl to his lip as he sat down on the edge of the cushion. His expression changes when he sees me nearly swallowed up in the cheap, overstuffed armchair across the way. Lust makes his dark eyes impossibly darker, and the curl becomes a smirk as he arranges his position so that he can eyeball my chest.
