Page 51

Aster Bishop

Molly left the bedroom the next morning to the most beautiful beacon of hope drifting through the air: the smell of freshly brewed coffee.

She’d spent her evening stifling restless anxiety with well-tread routines meant to soothe her mind. She’d braided and rebraided her hair. She’d indulged in a cup of hot chocolate in her most massive mug, painted with flowers and featuring a ceramic vine handle. She’d crawled between her sheets and surrounded herself with her cat and a collection of T. S. Eliot poems. Too overwhelmed by all the new information flooding her freshly restored phone, she’d called her dad instead, desperate for the dampening effect of his comfort as he regaled her with the ongoing debate in his HOA about grass versus rock lawns, and then with the story of how he’d met Terry.

Molly had gone to sleep still fighting a flurrying disappointment in her chest, worried about whatever came next with Aster.

What came next, evidently, was him sitting at their kitchen table, coffee prepared for her in an unfamiliar mug painted with a beautiful black-and-white loon and its haunting red eyes.

“We went to Acadia National Park,” he said quietly, pushing the mug toward her as she slid into the seat opposite him. “Last summer. You had some nostalgia about camping with your dad as a kid, but we both learned we like the idea of hiking more than we like actually doing it. You saw a pair of loons though. Said that made the whole trip worth it.”

She brushed her thumb over the painted bird and said longingly, “They’re so pretty.”

“Yeah.” Aster’s voice rang with longing too. He cleared his throat, then pivoted. “It’s from the spare room. It’s . . . an apology. Or at least the beginning of one.”

Molly watched him, unable to find her voice.

“I can’t forget the last six years,” he said, eyes fixed on her mug. “But I know you can’t remember them either. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about trying to get pregnant. I think—I’d hoped—that if you just remembered, I wouldn’t have to have the hard conversations. I’d like to amend my excuse-making yesterday to include that I am also a coward. I was being selfish and a coward.”

He cringed at himself, but to his credit, he kept going.

“But I’ve kept the good things from you too, hoping you’d remember. And that’s not fair. I’d like to show you.” He reached across the table and tapped her mug. “I’m still worried. About scaring you off, about hurting you too. So, if you’d be willing to entertain a compromise, I could pull one of these out every few days, tell you a little bit about it. Intentional, but paced.”

Molly’s anxiety seemed to evaporate with her next exhale, soothed by a solution, a path forward. Here was a compromise for Aster’s unwillingness to simply throw open the door to the spare room and inundate her with the life she was still getting to know, and it would do for the time being. Molly’s relentless curiosity had survived on less.

“Thank you,” she said. “I seem to have a lot of new photos on my phone, by the way. Contacts and conversations too. Apps. It’s . . . a lot. I’ve already had to put my blinders on and ignore most of it. I don’t even know where to begin.”

“If you have questions, I’ll answer them. Maybe we can start with photos from this trip,” he said, gesturing at the loon mug again. “I’ll make you breakfast, and then we’ll begin.”

And so, from one day to the next—almost without Molly realizing it—they slipped into something of a routine. One that involved shared mornings together before Aster left for work, off to tutor students for hours on end because he owned his own small tutoring and test prep business. I like children, he’d said. He’d shown. And it had taken until now, over two months into sharing a home with him, for Molly to finally ask for those details, and to do so with genuine interest.

Then in the evenings, quiet and tired and strangely hopeful, she and Aster would simply sit and talk like they were different people, strangers getting to know each other.

It was a conscious choice of relearning her life, of trusting him to teach her.

Molly picked at her cuticles, anxiety gnawing on her bones. Too-bright hospital lights washed out Dr. Macmillan as she reviewed and explained Molly’s most recent imaging.

Every other week they had this meeting.

Every other week they told her the same thing: “There appears to be no change.”

She’d insisted that Aster not bother taking time off work to sit in a waiting room. She didn’t need a trip to the hospital and a special picture of her brain to know nothing had changed inside her head.

“Considering we haven’t seen any evolution in your imagery or symptoms over the last couple of months,” Dr. Macmillan began, “we may need to begin preparing for a future where your memory has suffered irreparable damage.”

Molly’s comprehension caught on the word irreparable as it scraped at the inside of her skull. Her throat ran dry as a desert swept through her lungs.

“Mrs. Graham-Bishop?”

Irreparable.

“Yes?”

“We’re not saying there’s no hope, but without evidence of change at this point, it would be wise to consider the logistical and emotional eventualities should your memory not return in the way we hope.”

Molly’s cuticles paid the price of trying to hold herself together. “Of course. And—what does that mean? In a practical sense?” she asked, trying to remember to advocate for herself. She’d been wrong to ask Aster to stay behind; she needed an anchor.

“Nothing, for now. We’ll continue monitoring your progress. More importantly, we’re not giving up. But we do want to be realistic with our expectations.”