I had to believe we were going to get back to that.
I went back to the sitting room and poured myself a drink. I stood there and stared at it for a while, thinking about everything that had happened. Had I done everything I should have done? Should I have tried harder to contact her parents? I knew they’d be angry when they found out what had happened, that I didn’t try everything I could to get word to them. But they were the ones who insisted on taking these cruises without their cellphones. They made it clear they didn’t want to be disturbed under any circumstances.
But I knew these were special circumstances and they would have come home immediately had they known. And then they would have taken Harley back to Texas with them.
That was the last thing I wanted. It was bad enough that she couldn’t remember me. I didn’t want them making sure that was a permanent condition.
I stepped out onto the back porch and made my way slowly down to the pool. How many times had I stood out here these last few months, thinking about Harley? Thinking about everything that had happened and everything that should have happened? How many times had I stood on the balcony outside of our bedroom and watched her swim here? I didn’t even like to swim, didn’t like the chlorine clinging to my body. I planned on having the pool filled in from the moment I bought the house; I just hadn’t gotten around to it. But Harley was so excited to see it when she moved in. And it was an amazing sight to wake up to every morning, the sight of her in a bikini, cutting through the water in perfect form. Almost as amazing as waking to her sleeping form pressed against my body.
I missed her. I wanted my Harley back. The doctor assured me that her memory would like return with time. I wasn’t sure if I should be hoping for that, or if I should just hope that she would fall in love with me all over again, the past gone and forgotten.
I swallowed my drink and turned to go back inside. I had phone calls I needed to make. Things at the office had become chaotic during my impromptu absence. But then I caught sight of her sitting by the sliding glass doors in her room, watching me.
What was she thinking? Was she afraid of me? Was she curious?
I tried to imagine how I would feel in her place. But I couldn’t.
***
“She’s here?”
I leaned against the front door and stared down at Margaret. “Where else would she go? She can’t remember the last five years of her life.”
“Home? Don’t you think she should be in Texas with her family? With the people she does remember?”
“I’m her family, too.”
“But she doesn’t remember you, Xander. And when she does, do you really think you’re the one she’s going to want to find herself dependent on?”
“Go home, Margaret. The doctor said it wouldn’t be a good idea to introduce her to too many people at once.”
I started to close the door, but she pushed against it, brushing past me as she burst into the house.
“Where is she?”
“Resting.”
“Where? Upstairs? Don’t you think it’s a little soon for a reunion?”
“She’s in the guest bedroom out back.” I shot her a dark look. “Do you really think I’m that cruel?”
“I don’t know. We’ve had a few interesting experiences in our time together. I wouldn’t put it past you.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at her. “What do you want me to do, Margaret? I’ve already bled for you. There isn’t much more I can do.”
She ignored me, going to the small bar in the corner and pouring herself a glass of wine.
“Help yourself.”
“I always have.”
Margaret was a handful. She always has been.
We’d known each other since we were kids. Her father was a named partner in the law firm my mother had worked for since I was little. Thirty years she put in there, and she was still going strong. My mom would take me to work sometimes when there was a school holiday and she couldn’t arrange for a babysitter. When my mom’s boss caught me hiding under her desk one afternoon, he mentioned that he had a kid whose nanny wasn’t always as efficient as he would have liked. He suggested that my mom inform him when she was going to bring me to work so he could bring in his daughter and we could hang out together.
It was the beginning of a volatile relationship that I was afraid would never end.
We fought like cats and dogs, but if someone tried to separate us, we would turn our claws on them. As we grew older, we started going to the same schools. Margaret’s father arranged for me to get into Margaret’s private schools on scholarship because he said I was the only thing that could control her. We were inseparable. We were brother and sister, friends, lovers. We were just about everything to each other two people could be.
And now she was trying to play my conscience.
“I don’t need you marching in here, telling me what I can and cannot do.”
“Someone needs to. Does your mother know what’s going on?”
“Of course.”
“She can’t be terribly happy about it.”
“She’s just worried about Harley. Like the rest of us.”
“I’m worried about her, too. That’s why I think this is a terrible idea.”
“Harley loves me. We were supposed to be married this summer. She’ll remember that in time.”
“I’m sure. But I’m also sure she’ll remember some of the other things that happened this summer. And what will you do then?”
“I’ll deal with it when it comes up.”
“When what comes up?”
I turned, my heart sinking. Harley had just rolled her wheelchair into the room.
And she was staring at Margaret with something like recognition.
Chapter 10
Harley
It was the woman from my dream.
It was so vivid…me standing in a bridal store, wearing a dress I would never wear in a million years. And she was sitting in a chair, watching. She never said anything. She just watched. But I knew…I just, I felt her judgment as she watched.
“Who are you?”
The woman seemed a little surprised that I knew how to talk, or something. She was holding a glass of wine, but the glass was shaking a little. I didn’t understand why she should be so nervous to see me.
“This is Margaret,” Xander said. “She’s an old friend of mine.”
“Margaret.” I thought it might feel familiar on my tongue, but it didn’t. But I knew her. Why else would she have appeared in my dreams if I didn’t?
“You were working on a project with her,” Xander continued. “You were painting a mural in a community center she was renovating for the kids in West Hollywood.”
“A mural?”
“It was part of the reason you moved to Los Angeles.”
I couldn’t remember. It was so frustrating because I knew it was right there, but I couldn’t remember it.
The woman took a long swallow of her wine and set the glass down on the narrow bar.
“I should go,” she said.
“No, please. Don’t let me interrupt.”
She looked at me, her face suddenly very pale.
“We’re we friends?”
She nodded slowly. “We were. I was to be one of your bridesmaids.”
I nodded slowly. “Did we go look at dresses together?”
If it was possible for her face to get paler, it did then.
“Once,” she said so quietly I almost missed it.
She seemed so…guilty. What did she have to be guilty about?
I had so many questions, but she turned to Xander and kissed his cheek lightly, whispering something near his ear as she did. Then she turned to me, a forced smile on her lips. “I have to go. But I’ll come back sometime to see you.”
And then she was gone in a puff, leaving even Xander staring at her wake.
“Did I do something to her?”
Xander shook his head. “Margaret is somethi
ng of a character. She’s always acting oddly.”
“The two of you are close?”
A sudden caution came into his expression.
“We’ve known each other most of our lives.”
“Were you ever romantically involved?”
Now it was his turn to pale. He came over to me and slipped behind my wheelchair, pushing me toward the kitchen. “It’s time for your medication.”
“It won’t upset me if you talk to me about your romantic past.”
“You always said you didn’t want to know about it.”
“I did?”
“Yeah. You told me you would rather just start from the beginning of us and pretend like the past no longer existed.”
“That’s an odd thing for me to say.”
“Yes, well, Philip’s betrayal really scarred you. You didn’t want to know anything about my past that might change the way you felt about me, I guess.”
“I suppose that makes sense. But wouldn’t it have been better for me to know so that there wouldn’t be any surprises?”
“Yeah, well, I guess that never occurred to either of us.”
There was something in his voice when he said that; it caused me to wonder if there was something in his past that could have, or did, change the way I felt about him. But he changed the subject before I could push it any further.
***
I was having that dream again. It was odd because I knew it was a dream. But it also felt like a memory—even though I don’t remember it actually happening.
That woman was there. We were in the bridal shop and I was wearing that hideous dress. This time we were laughing, as though it was some great joke. She said something, but I didn’t quite hear what it was she said. And then the dream shifted.
We were in a cavernous room that was so large our voices were echoing off the walls.
“I can’t believe you would betray me that way! Why wouldn’t you tell me something like that? I thought we were friends. You were supposed to be a part of my wedding for God’s sake!”
“It wasn’t my place to tell you. Xander should have done it.”
“But we worked together all this time—”
“I thought he’d already told you. I thought you were okay with it.”
“Well, you thought too much.”
“It was a lifetime ago, Harley. It’s been over so long that it doesn’t even feel like it was part of this life.”
“But it was. And neither of you felt the need to tell me.”
I had no idea what we were arguing over; yet, the emotions roaring through my body were very real. There were tears streaming down my face, and my fists were clutched at my side—tight enough that I could feel the ache in my fingers. And the rage in my chest…it wasn’t just anger. It was rage. I don’t think I’d ever felt emotion quite like that ever before.
It was so intense that it pulled me out of the dream, out of sleep all together. I sat up, my breath coming in small, awkward puffs.
“Xander.”
His name was on my lips before I even realized he was on my mind. But the moment I spoke it, my body began to ache for him in a way I couldn’t remember ever feeling. My body remembered him. My heart remembered him. And that scared me.
How could somebody love someone so much that even when the individual couldn’t remember that person, the body—the soul—could?
Chapter 11
Harley
“This is from a weekend we spent in Malibu,” Xander said, as he scrolled to a new picture on his phone. “We stayed at a friend’s house and spent most of the weekend walking on the beach.”
I stared at my own face smiling at me, Xander’s cheek pressed against mine with an even wider grin. It was one of those selfies that sickeningly adorable couples took to rub in the faces of all their single friends on Facebook or Twitter. I couldn’t get over how happy I looked—even with the first hints of a sunburn on my shoulders.
“That was after I moved to Los Angeles?”
“Yes. About two or three months after. I remember it was still a little cold outside, so we had to wear sweaters when we walked in the evenings.”
I nodded, still staring at the picture.
I’d been here—I still couldn’t quite bring myself to call it home—for almost a week. Xander tried to give me space, but we kept having these conversations where he would talk about people I didn’t know, places I didn’t remember going, and things I couldn’t even imagine doing, let alone remember doing. So he thought showing me a few pictures of our life together might help.
But I didn’t recognize that girl in those pictures.
“This was a dinner party we attended at my mother’s boss’s house.”
I studied the picture, admiring the black shoes the girl who looked like me was wearing.
“It that your mother?”
“Yeah. That’s her.”
I studied the woman with the dark hair and blue eyes that were so much like Xander’s. There was no doubt that they were related. She was a little shorter—more petite than I would have imagined such a large man’s mother would be—but I could see him in the lines of her face and the shape of her nose. She was a beautiful woman.
“What’s her name?”
“Bonnie.”
I nodded, even though it didn’t ring any bells. “She looks like a nice person.”
“She is. One of the nicest women I know.” He moved the phone, swiping his finger over it to find another photo. “She really liked you.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. What do you say to a statement like that?
Great. I’m sure I loved her, too?
“This is us about a week after you moved here. We were hiking up in one of the canyons.”
I tilted my head slightly as I looked at the picture. I was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, a red and black fanny pack around my waist. I thought I recognized the shorts, but that was about it.
“And this was our engagement party.”
The picture he showed me then was of the two of us standing with a group of strangers. A dark-haired woman. His mother. Margaret. Another dark-haired woman. A thin, squirrely looking man. A couple with their arms wrapped around one another.
This was just confusing me more than it was helping.
I sat back and rubbed my hand over my head, the feel of the thin stubble that now covered my head as disconcerting and foreign as the faces in these photos. My leg ached, and the skin under the plaster itched like crazy. My shoulder ached; my arm was cramped from the sling where it was constantly stuck. And my head felt like I had the world’s worst headache.
I wanted to be anywhere but here. I wanted to go home, to surround myself with people I knew, people who knew me. I wanted my life to go back to some sort of normal.
And when I looked at Xander, I wished I could give him back the woman he was clearly missing.
He wasn’t looking at me. He was scrolling through the pictures, clearly lost in his own memories of those moments. I felt bad because I felt like I was letting him down. I was trying. Really, I was trying to remember who I was. I wanted to remember. But it just wasn’t happening.
“What happened to the ring?”
He looked up, tilting his phone slightly so that I could see that he was looking at yet another of those ridiculous selfies of the two of us. Only in this one I was smiling at the camera and he was looking at me, an adoring look in his eyes.
How could I forget a man who would look at me that way?
“The ring?”
“You said we were engaged. We were already planning the wedding. So what happened to the ring?”
He set his phone on the coffee table and stood, walking over to the entryway. He stepped just out of sight and was back in a second, a small black box in his hands.
“They took all your jewelry off at the hospital.”
He handed me the box and sat beside me again, a look of expectation on his face.
I wasn’t sure I wanted t
o see the ring. Would it bring back memories? Or would it just be a ring, another part of my past I couldn’t remember?
I popped open the box and gasped a little as I stared at the impressive ring inside. It was a large, heart-shaped diamond set in platinum. It was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. The diamond itself was so clear…I didn’t know anything about diamonds, but even I could tell he’d spent a great deal of money on this ring. Not that money really mattered, but still…it was impressive.
I slid it out of the box and had a suddenly flash of memory:
“I think four would be the perfect number. Two boys. Two girls.”
“Four? Are you sure we could handle that many?”
“If you can handle me, you can handle a whole houseful of kids.”
He laughed. “Then why stop at four. We could have eight or nine. A whole baseball team!”
My hands started to shake. I thought for a moment that I might drop the ring.
“Hey…you okay?”
I looked at Xander, and I could see the laughter dancing in his eyes as it had the night we became engaged.
“We were supposed to have dinner with one of your clients. But when we got to the restaurant, you had rented the whole place for the night. There was a violinist and roses everywhere…red and yellow and that odd blue color that you said was twice as expensive so it must be the best.”
His eyes widened. “You remember?”
“You got down on your knee as soon as we walked inside because you said you were so nervous you were afraid you’d lose your courage if you didn’t do it immediately. And I told you that you should have waited because if I’d said no, it would have spoiled the dinner you arranged.”
He nodded. “And I said that if you’d said no, I wouldn’t have wanted to have food in my stomach anyway because I would have been as sick as a dog.”
“But we ended up not eating because you just wanted to come home.”
He nodded again, the excitement in his eyes bringing more and more of the memory back to me.
I remembered the feel of his hand on my thigh as we drove back to the house. The taste of his lips as he kissed me while he fumbled with the front door. We didn’t make it up the stairs. We…a blush burned my cheeks when I realized I was sitting where we made love that night. The first time, anyway. And then we lay in bed, our fingers intertwined, planning our future.
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