Page 92 of Stay Awake
“This article says a third person was taken to the hospital with critical injuries. Who was it?” I ask quietly, still holding onto the clipping.
“It was you, Liv. You’re lucky to be alive. There’s a scar on your torso from the stab wound.”
I lift up my top and am confronted by a jagged scar under my rib cage. Seeing the scar drives home the truth of what I’ve just read. Amy and Marco really are dead. I lower myself back onto the sofa, my body trembling with shock.
Ted sits next to me. He leans my head against his chest and puts his arms around me. His warm comforting embrace tugs at my heart. I feel as if I’ve come home.
“I’m so sorry, Liv. I hate having to tell you the same terrible news over and over again,” he murmurs. “Each time it devastates you as if it’s the first time you’ve heard it.”
“Who killed them?”
“Nobody knows.”
“I was there. I must have seen something?”
“You were almost killed yourself. When you woke from the coma, you didn’t remember anything about the murder,” he says. “Over time,snippets of images would flash in your head. You thought they were memories from the murder, but you were never sure.”
Ted recounts how I once described a flashback of looking up from the floor and seeing Amy’s pink kimono hanging on her bedroom door hook. Another time I woke in the middle of the night and immediately sketched a dotted medallion pattern that flashed in my head. I’d insisted that I’d seen it when I was stabbed.
“One time you had a memory of shoes covered in blood walking away from you. When you looked into it, you found out there were no bloody footprints at the scene. You must have imagined it,” Ted tells me. “You also remembered a voice urging you to ‘stay awake’ and a siren in the background. Although those recollections came to you after you insisted on listening to a recording of the nine-one-one call in the hope that it would jog your memory.”
Later, I think about the flashbacks Ted described as I hang my clothes in the closet in the bedroom and arrange my toiletries in a bathroom cupboard.
My last memory before waking this morning was answering my office phone. “This is Liv,” I’d said into the receiver.
After that I remember nothing until Ted’s pounding on the front door woke me this morning at that dingy basement apartment. I don’t remember Amy and Marco’s murders. I don’t remember being stabbed, or being in the hospital. I don’t remember Ted, or our engagement. Or any flashbacks of the murder. My life over the past two years is a blank.
“How did we meet?” I ask Ted later, sitting on a kitchen barstool as I watch him make sandwiches for lunch.
“We met when you moved to London,” he says, cutting in half my lox and cream cheese bagel.
“I lived in London?”
“After Amy and Marco were killed, you moved to London and freelanced atCultura UK. That’s where I worked. We fell in love and got engaged.”
I look at my hands. No rings. “Where’s my engagement ring?”
“It didn’t work out,” he says, handing me a plate.
“Why? What happened to us?”
“I was offered a big promotion. It involved relocating to New York. You flatly refused to move back here. You were afraid the killer might come after you since you were the only witness. We tried to keep things going, but it gradually fizzled out,” he says, pausing as if deliberating how much more to tell me. “To be fair, things weren’t great before then.”
“In what way?” I toy with my sandwich. My appetite has disappeared.
“You were consumed with finding out who killed Amy and Marco. It took over your life. You blamed yourself because you knew the killer was still free, and you believed that if you could only remember who it was, then the cops would arrest him, or her,” he says.
“That’s why we broke up?”
He lifts up my chin and looks deeply into my eyes. “I wanted to make a life with you, Liv. Get married. Have a family. You kept delaying it.”
“Why?
“Your obsession with the past. Constantly trying to piece together what happened. Listening to the nine-one-one recording over and over again. Papering the walls of our flat with newspaper clippings. Amy and Marco’s murders were all you ever talked about. It consumed you. Ultimately it consumed our relationship. It destroyed us.”
He reaches for my hand and squeezes it gently. “Marco cheated on you, Liv. With your best friend. They betrayed you, and yet you couldn’t let go. You blamed yourself for their deaths. You kept letting the past come between us.” His voice is laced with raw pain. “You never gave us a chance.”
“I wish I could go back and change things,” I say, my eyes wet. “I feel like you and I could have been happy together.”
