Page 76 of Hate You Most

Her headaches had completely disappeared over the past few days. Her thoughts were clearer now, sharper. The only thing that reminded her of the crash was her missing memory. Which meant the questions she had been quietly ignoring were getting harder to push away.

They were married.

Dakota had said it so calmly and so matter-of-factly, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. And yet everything around her seemed to contradict it.

Viktoriya exhaled slowly and turned away from the window.

She needed to find her phone or her laptop. She needed to figure out why the only memories she was able to remember, weren't the happy ones that Dakota had described to her. If she was unhappy in her marriage and couldn't remember, she needed to figure that out.

Dakota had never actually handed her phone to her—even after she had been allowed to use it. And like a complete idiot, Viktoriya hadn't asked about it once. If she had asked about it, she wasn't sure Dakota would've given it to her without a long conversation.

She walked into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed, staring at the neatly made sheets.

Dakota hadn’t thrown her phone away. That much was obvious. If she had, she would have said so, which meant it had to be somewhere in the apartment.

Hidden somewhere.

Viktoriya hesitated for a moment before standing again. She wasn’t sure if what she was about to do counted as snooping or simply reclaiming something that belonged to her.

Either way, she started looking.

She opened drawers first—carefully, quietly, as if Dakota could somehow hear what she was doing from the rink. Most of them contained ordinary things: notebooks, chargers, loose pens, an old scarf folded neatly at the bottom of a dresser.

Nothing.

She checked the closet in the hallway next. Jackets hung in tidy rows, their pockets mostly empty except for the occasional receipt or pair of gloves.

She moved around the living room, tried all the drawers in the kitchen and looked through the cabinets too. Still nothing.

Then she noticed the small desk in the far corner of the living room. It had a small drawer she had never dared open, mostly because it looked like it belonged to Dakota’s workspace.

Viktoriya walked over, crouched down and pulled it open. Inside it was a tangled mess of cables, a small notebook, an extra pair of sunglasses. And beneath them—a phone. She stared at it for several seconds before reaching in and picking it up.

A black, sleek, solid screen without a single button on the front. Viktoriya turned it over in her hands, the back being a white glitter case with small red hearts. She felt like a neanderthal. Where were the buttons and what was she meant to push with her finger to unlock it?

She touched the screen and it lit up, a little lock icon unlocked at the top. She stared at it. Viktoriya swiped upward and before she could even think about entering a passcode, the phone vibrated in her hand and unlocked.

Viktoriya blinked at the now unlocked phone in her hand. She didn't even have to enter a code.

The layout on the phone was completely unrecognizable to the phone she remembered owning. The phone she had in 2014 was small and had a button on the front. This new phone was way larger, and the apps looked more polished. The background on her old phone had been a picture of her skates, and that remained unchanged on her new one.

Her thumb hovered over the icons before finally tapping the Photos app.

Thousands of pictures filled the screen instantly.

She moved to the couch with the phone in her hand and began scrolling through them. The first pictures she saw were the newest ones—the pictures she hadn't remembered taking. They looked completely normal, and also completely deprived of any soul.

Pictures of coffee cups on small café tables. The sunset hovering over the wing of a plane. Street corner signs from places she didn’t recognize. There were no pictures of Dakota and barely any pictures of herself.

The photos looked oddly curated. Every picture looked composed and staged. Almost aesthetic.

There were no random screenshots, no blurry accidental photos, and no pictures of grocery lists or receipts. It looked less like a real phone gallery and more like something carefully selected for social media.

Viktoriya kept scrolling.

The pictures from 2022 to 2019 did not include Dakota. There were pictures of America and pictures of Russia. Pictures of rainy and snowy nights, and of buildings. There were sparse photos of a man with an overgrown buzz cut, tattoos and piercing green eyes throughout. The recognition tugged at her chest. She had definitely seen the man before, but she couldn't remember where or how they had been introduced.

She scrolled further down and the pictures shifted to mostly being of her on the ice. Pictures and videos of her doing jumps. They looked professionally taken and were clearly filmed with a professional camera.