But this dream, the one where Tyson had busted into Preston’s birthday party to announce his engagement, was still fresh in my head. It was silly, but I literally had nothing to lose. A little harmless investigating couldn’t hurt.
Me: So how long has Tyson been engaged?
Bowen: About seven months.
Damn. I didn’t even have to use my fingers on that math. Seven months earlier was right around the time of the settlement when Bowen and I had “met” at the courthouse. I still had those memories, painfully so.
Mentally ridiculing myself for getting my hopes up, I typed a quick congratulatory text, but Bowen’s came through before I had the chance to hit send.
Bowen: But Jared and Tyson have been together for roughly an eternity. They got engaged a year or so ago, then called it off for reasons they never explained. Tyson was a mess though. Few months later, Jared proposed all over again. Thankfully, this time he wised up and didn’t do it on Preston’s birthday, thus starting World War III with Cassidy again.
My heart stopped as I bolted upright in the bed.
Oh my God.
I remembered that.
Oh.
My.
God.
I really, truly, and unmistakably remembered it. It was real. It had to be. There was no other way I would have known he’d gotten engaged at Preston’s party.
A year or so ago would have fit the timeline too. It would have been before the plane crash, during the block of time I had no memories of.
What if all these flashes of time weren’t dreams or my heart conjuring scenarios of when Bowen and I were still together, hopelessly in love, but rather my brain cracking the lock on the safe inside my head, leaking the past in glimpses?
My hands shook as I stared at his text. Tears formed in my eyes. I’d have given anything to have my memories back. To remember the woman who had fallen in love and then fallen apart. To see an actual person in the mirror rather than a figment of my imagination who had been crafted from stories like a real-life paint-by-number project.
Equal parts fear and hope soared inside me.
I racked my brain, trying to remember stories Bowen had told me of the past that it might have used to make up this scenario. He’d told me about Preston’s Charlie Chaplin dummy on our first real date. Not that I’d given it to his nephew, but that he’d received it. I knew that Tyson had a fiancé named Jared. Just the word fiancé meant that he had to have gotten engaged at some point. I knew Linda and the fact that she loved to bake—hence the cookies in my dream. I’d met Cassidy at Bowen’s house when I’d gone to get Sugar. She had been funny and snarky in the few minutes I’d spent with her then.
Maybe it was just the product of coincidence and rapidly firing neurons.
But maybe it wasn’t.
I stood up and began to pace the room.
Okay. Okay. I just had to breathe and collect more information. I didn’t want to tip Bowen off though. It was probably nothing, and he would be as excited as I was. After everything we’d been through, the idea of disappointing him seemed almost worse than the let-down I was surely setting myself up for. I could start out with a generic question and then lead into more specifics without him thinking anything was up.
I needed to play it cool. This was a simple, casual conversation between two people. Nothing more and nothing less.
Me: Soooo…did I go to Preston’s party that year? The one when Tyson got engaged?
I already had a mental list of follow-up questions prepared, my fingers poised over the keys. His reply rendered them all useless.
Bowen: No. You were away at a mental health facility.
The proverbial record came to a screeching halt. All my hopes crashed down around me.
Me: Oh.
Bowen: It’s okay. You didn’t miss much.
He was wrong. Suddenly, it felt like I’d missed everything.
Me: You’re probably right. Get some rest, Bowen. Talk tomorrow?
Bowen: God, I hope so. Sweet dreams, Remi.
I stood there in the middle of my bedroom, in nothing but his T-shirt, my mind turning over anything and everything I could remember. No matter how many times I tried to work it through, I just couldn’t make sense of it all.
I’d had a dream. Parts of it were real. Parts of it weren’t. There were things I couldn’t have possibly known unless they were memories. Others were slightly easier to explain. Hell, even if they were just memories of something someone had once told me before the plane crash, they still constituted as memories as far as I was concerned.
But then again, what if this was all for nothing? I had no frame of reference to decipher between fact or fiction. Dream or reality. Truth or lies. Not an hour ago, the likelihood of these dreams being memories seemed ludicrous. Now, I wasn’t so sure.
