I am asking a lot of questions, and not only because I want to be believable as a woman suffering from partial amnesia, but also because I’m curious about Fox’s answers, and about seeing us and me through his eyes.
Fox drives us home, taking the long way.
He goes past Dina’s, and I look at it with real recognition—don’t have to fake that—and past the Arcade and through Germantown. I watch it through the window.
We come home, and a wave of longing runs through me.
I think about the morning I walked to his office—the cassoulet, the conference room, all of it. Anger surges.
Then, I look at what I made, what I grew in a place that was never fully mine, and the anger does something it hasn’t done yet.
It wobbles.
Just for a moment. Just at the peonies.
I planted peonies the first spring we lived together—after the baby. I think caring for the garden was my way of healing.
Fox’s mother stood on the lawn in her sunglasses with an air of insouciance. “You should get a landscaper, darling, and not get dirt under your nails.”
“Mother, this is her garden.” Fox put an arm around me. “She can do whatever she wants here.”
It was his way of saying, butt out, woman.
See, those were the things that made me feel loved, made me feel like he chose me. Now, I don’t know what was real and what wasn’t. I don’t know whatisreal and whatisn’t.
And my head hurts all the time, which makes it hard for me to think in straight lines, which makes me wonder:How damaged is my brain? What am I doing pretending not to know Fox?
He opens the car door and offers his hand to help me out.
I take it.
We stand in the driveway as I look around.
I loved living here.
I loved him.
Oh, Lucy, you still love him.
And that makes me feel pathetic and foolish.
My ribs shift when I breathe. The pain makes my eyes water. Fox’s hand tightens on mine.
“Sweetheart, are you okay?”
I want to scream that he doesn’t get to ask me that, call me sweetheart, say he loves me whenever he feels like, or kiss me whenever he wants, because it all makes me needy and hopeful, and I don’t want to be either.
“I moved wrong,” I murmur.
He walks me into our house—the one I thought was mine—and I stand in the hallway and say nothing.
I know this house.
I know the Victorian bones of it, the high ceilings and the original cornicing that someone decided to keep when they gutted everything else and pulled it into the present.
I know the formal living room off the hallway, the deep sofas and the fireplace with the mantle that has actual things on it—our things—and the tall windows that look into the garden.
I know that this is not where we live. This is where the house presents itself.
