“And yet here we are, with her sharing your bed.”
“What the hell did you expect me to do? You know Remi. There is no stopping her once she sets her mind to something. She showed up at my office, all lovestruck and starry-eyed.” I dug my wallet out of my back pocket, fished out the safety pin, and held it in the air. “She gave this back to me. You can’t possibly look me in the eye and tell me that doesn’t mean something?”
Aaron swallowed hard and cut his gaze to the floor. It was obviously not the first time he’d heard this story.
Mark’s chin jerked to the side, his mouth a hard slash. “Are you… Are you saying she remembers?”
My stomach knotted. The burning ashes of all the hope I’d been carrying since she’d waltzed back into my life rained down over me, searing my skin. “No. There’s nothing there. For fuck’s sake, she brought me peanut butter cookies. But she’s drawn to me in ways she can’t explain.” I swallowed past the razor blades in my throat. “Look, after the plane crash, when we realized she’d lost her memory, I promised I would stay away as long as she didn’t remember. But she’s in there. She’s not the same Sally I fell in love with, but for fuck’s sake, she’s still in love with me.”
Mark’s jaw ticked at the hinges. “You selfish bastard. You’re gonna ruin her life. We hit the fucking lottery when she lost that year of her memories. We got her back, and you’re going to throw that away over some ridiculous notion of love? Do you even fucking remember how bad it got after she disappeared?”
My hand flexed at my side, fighting the urge to bury it in his face again. “I don’t need a refresher course. I was there every Goddamn agonizing day. I still can’t look at my hands without seeing them covered in her blood.”
“If she remembers, we all risk losing her again.”
He wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t already considered. After Remi had given me the safety pin back, I’d spent the entire night pacing my house and berating myself for even considering letting her back into my life. The whole reason I’d agreed to walk away to begin with was because I didn’t exist in the version of her life she remembered after the plane crash. And neither did the five horrific days when she’d been kidnapped. She wasn’t haunted by fear or trauma. She wasn’t angry because the authorities didn’t believe her. Nor was she overwhelmed with guilt for not being able to save the woman crying in the corner. It was as if her brain had rebooted, deleting the timeline in which the world had broken her.
The doctors had told us talking about the time she’d lost and showing her pictures might help jog her memory.
But all we’d wanted was for her to forget. Permanently.
It was all too easy to remove me from her life. She had decades of memories with Mark, Aaron, and her dad before the plane crash. There were only three weeks with me that weren’t tangled up in the horror of the week she’d been taken.
Everything about us had been wrapped in tragedy.
The fear was that my presence would trigger something in her brain.
And when I saw her smiling outside that hospital, and I mean, really smiling—like the Sally I’d fallen in love with damn near the minute I’d laid eyes on her—I knew that was not a chance I could take.
During the depths of her darkness, I told her there was absolutely nothing I wouldn’t do to take the pain away. As it turned out, that included letting her go.
But knowing she was out there, happy and healthy, breathing easy, surrounded by people who loved her—that was all I’d needed. I never stopped loving her though. Never stopped wishing she’d come back to me. It was wholly selfish, yet I still dreamed.
But what if we could have it all now?
She didn’t remember our inside jokes, late-night soul-baring conversations, or even how I’d proposed. Sally, the woman I had spent nine months falling in love with, was gone. But Remi was very much alive and well. She didn’t have to remember. She was already on the verge of falling for me again. Maybe this was the miracle we’d all been praying for.
Mark and Aaron might not have agreed with what I was doing, but I didn’t give the first fuck what they thought. They’d gotten to keep her. They hadn’t spent the last six months with a gaping hole in their chest, struggling for one single breath that actually contained oxygen. Fuck them and anyone else who thought they could stand in my way.
The world owes you nothing.
But somehow, it had still given her back to me.
