“We’ll do some more tests,” the psychiatrist announces.“Sometimes, during times of extreme trauma, the brain throws you back to a time in your life when you felt safe.”
Yes.This part I understand. I do feel safe at sixteen. I have parents who adore me. A best friend who sticks to my side like glue. I have goals and plans and meticulously documented dreams, none of which include waking up thirteen years later with dark hair, posh glasses, and a huge phone, totally isolated from everything in the entire world that ever mattered to me.
“If it’s dissociative amnesia,” he adds, “the memory loss is almost always temporary. It may just take some time and therapy.”
“Amnesia?”
“It can help to surround yourself in familiarity,” Liz suggests. “Be around the people who care about you and something might flash back.”
What people, though? My husband is dead. The people who loved me aren’t even in my phone. Gwendolyn sounded like a cross between Miss Trunchbull and Lady Macbeth.
Then I remember the thirty-eight missed calls. Are they from my friends?
I click on my recent call history. But it’s allOliver Mobile. Oliver Messenger Video. Oliver Messenger Audio.
This is useless. I open my camera roll. At first glance, I seem to have taken about twenty shots of the same autumn leaf.What’s wrong with me?
I scroll back further, hoping for signs of human life.
There are some pictures of someone’s kid. A little girl with blond pigtails. Out-of-focus, crooked selfies she’s taken. Photos of her laughing and smiling and pulling faces and poking her tongue out. Wonky pictures she’s taken of me, all out of proportion and elongated due to the angles.
“Does she look familiar?” Liz asks.
No.
And nor do I.
I shake my head, zooming in on my face. I’m smiling into the lens at this kid, like I love her. Surely she isn’tmine?
Oh my God, even worse than not having a mum is the impossible idea that I couldbeone! At the very thought, the bottom seems to drop out of my bed. I grab the guardrails, walls spinning, the concept of having a child giving me vertigo. Maybe she’s Bree’s. Or the kid of some random friend I’ve forgotten? Perhaps I’m her nanny—that has to be it. This body hasn’t gone throughchildbirth, has it?
I kick the sheet off my legs dramatically. Is this a hot flash? No! I’m notthatold.
I keep scrolling through more photos, desperate for answers. My heart races as my thumb stops, settling on a picture of a man.
Could this be him? Oliver, the husband?Crazy hothusband, if I do say so myself. I pinch the screen and zoom. It must be him. What other man would be gazing into my lens as though he adored me?
My focus ambles over his precision-styled blond hair and across the strong contours of his cheekbones. I admire the sparkle in his blue eyes. A beautiful blue. Startling eyes, really. The kind of intense expression and movie-star jaw that younger me would have absolutely fallen for. It’s that boy band perfection I secretly idolized.
Nicely done, Evie. I mean, if you had to sell out and marry someone.
And now I imagine for the first time how all of this might have unfolded. If a man likethissingled out someone like me,I can see how I might have been swayed. Last I knew, there were precisely zero boys on the scene. Breanna told me it was because I was fixated on the 1800s and on academics, and that I became an anxious wreck the second a boy glanced in my direction. And she was right. My No Romance rule was because I was hugely ambitious. I knew exactly how much love my romantic heart was capable of, and the truth was I was scared. Worried I’d meet a boy so magnetic, so utterly charming and charismatic and fascinating and glorious, that he would make a total mess of me. Of my academic plans. Of my big dreams. Losing myself was always my biggest fear. A fear that has suddenly been realized in the very worst of ways, because here I am, having found that kind of love and lost it, leaving me all at sea in a bewildering reality that makes no sense.
“Breathe, Evie,” Liz says soothingly, while the heart monitor charges off.
“I think this is him.” I show her the screen. “Oliver.”
The victim.
She takes my phone, then she glances back at me, probably thinking what I’m thinking.In what universe didyoupull off a match this triumphant?
“I’m so sorry, Evie,” she says, mouth grim, eyes welling.
Because itwasa triumphant match. Past tense.
Knowing the girl I was, there’s no explanation for the path I’ve taken other than this romance must have beenit. An all-consuming, period-drama-rivaling, personal-rule-breaking love story that teenage me had secretly been pining for all along.
And now I’ve gone and forgotten every blissful second of it.
