“It wasn’t an engagement party, Lucy,” he said, his voice low and slow, as though the effort to speak was too much.
With a frown I looked at the card, which clearly stated it was, in fact, an engagement party. Then I looked at the wording more carefully.We’re getting engaged!NotWe got engaged!
He shook his head. “I know that’s what it says, but we were...” He stopped, lowered his face into his hands and rubbed at his cheeks and forehead. “We were going to get married.”
Still I stared, frown in place. “I know. I remember the proposal.”
“No,” Matt said, looking up at me. “We were getting marriedthatday.” He gestured to the card. “It wasn’t a party to celebrate our engagement. It was our wedding day.”
My legs started to tingle and I had to sit down, too, worried I would collapse if I didn’t. Now we faced one another at the table. “What?”
“The reason no one knows we were engaged is because we didn’t tell anyone. Your mom had started dating Carl and your dad was struggling a bit, and Alex was still fairly anti-wedding after what happened with Paolo, and Jenny was frustrated by her single status, and you said you didn’t want to ‘rub our perfect happiness’ in their faces.” He used air quotes and smiled, but it wasn’t on his face for long.
“Plus, having done the whole engagement thing before, you said you wanted to skip the year of fussing and fawning before the wedding. You didn’t even want the white dress. You were going to wear the same dress from my parents’ anniversary party.”The canary yellow A-line I had looked so cheerful in.
I glanced at the card, which was now crumpled on one side from me squeezing it too hard. I released it onto the table, where it unfurled.
“It was your idea, and it was superspontaneous. Like, you came up with it the morning after I proposed before we had the chance to tell anyone. But I loved it. The plan was for me to mail these cards out with a note saying the party was a surprise—I was going to tell you it was an anniversary dinner or something to get you there—and I would propose in front of all our friends and family.”
I tried to wrap my head around the idea that if everything had continued on as expected, Matt and I would now be married. We would be newlyweds, and ecstatic about it—in stark contrast to how we felt right now, both of us with sagging shoulders and long faces.
No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t see the line leading from where Matt and I were now back to the couple we had been. Too much was different, even if much had stayed the same: Matt loving me, Matt wanting to marry me, Matt believing we could make it work if we tried hard enough. My accident broke us right down the middle, with no apparent way to stitch the frayed ends back together.
“But of course you were in on it, though no one else would know that. And then when everyone showed up for the ‘Matt is popping the question’ party, we were instead going to exchange vows.” He sighed deeply, leaned back in his chair. “That was the plan.”
“We were so, so close,” I whispered.
“We were.”
Sadness engulfed me as my fingers smoothed the creases on the save-the-date card’s crumpled edge. “And then I hit my head.”
“And then you hit your head,” he said.
41
“Are you feeling better?” Dr. Kay asked. “It’s a bad bug going around.”
I had canceled my appointment the week before, begged off sick even though I wasn’t. I couldn’t face talking about Brooke or Daniel or Matt and my goddamn memory confidence, so tired of the drama and sorrow that surrounded all of it.
“I am. Thanks,” I replied.
“So, Lucy, tell me—how have the past two weeks been?” she asked, settling deeper into her chair. My intention today had been to tell her everything. I needed an opinion from someone who had no stakes in this game. It was all in my notebook—carefully documented day by day so I could know for sure what was real and what wasn’t, in case my memory went haywire again. But for whatever reason I couldn’t pull my notebook out, wanting to keep it tucked away so I didn’t have to deal with the fallout of recent events.
I knew at the very least I should mention the proposal—it was, after all, the game changer, wasn’t it?—but it stayed stuck in the back of my throat. I didn’t want to share it quite yet, to analyze how I was feeling about knowing Matt and I would have been married already if I hadn’t slipped. Of all the memories that could have flooded back, this one felt the cruelest, because it was both critically importantanduseless. If I wasn’t in love with Matt in the present, what difference did it make that I remembered saying yes to his proposal in the past?
I opted to focus on the work issue instead. “It was...interesting,” I said.
She raised her eyebrows behind her tortoiseshell eyeglasses, finely tuned into my tone. “Care to elaborate?”
“Well, work was going well, until it wasn’t,” I began, sighing deeply as I told her about Brooke and what had happened with the press release. How I was sure she was trying to undermine my position at the firm by using my memory against me. And finally I admitted, for the first time out loud, how I was most worried Brooke wasn’t completely off base.
“How so?” Dr. Kay asked.
“I thought my work life was secure. My recollection of it, I mean, because I remembered everything correctly. But it turns out I was planning to let Brooke go. The same week I had my accident. And I didn’t remember a single thing about it.” I rubbed my temples, pressed my fingertips in deeply.
“Would you like a glass of water, Lucy?”
I let my hands drop. “No, thanks. Just thinking things through.”
