by Maggie Way
“After he woke up, the doctors released him, and the woman, Gretchen, took Alex in and let him live with her,” Sarah said. A crash of emotions swept through her. Alex had been living with another woman this whole time? At least he had someone, she told herself. What if he had just been turned out onto the street?
“You’re going to love this, Corey, Alex learned how to cook and started a catering business,” Sarah said.
“A chef?” She could not believe that. Alex had grown up with money and still had money. A lot of it. He had never so much as boiled water as far as Corey knew. How in the world had he become a chef? Running his own business, though, that sounded exactly like Alex. Ever since he disappeared, his brother and Corey had been trying to take his place managing the four car dealerships she and Alex owned.
“Excuse me, ma’am, this is a restricted area,” a security guard said as he held out a hand to stop Corey.
“Just a minute, Sarah,” she said. Turning to the security guard, she tried to explain but the kids beat her to it.
“We’re here to see daddy!” they yelled as they bounced up and down.
“Does your husband work here?” the guard asked.
“No, but he’s here. He’s on the Today show right now. I have to find him. It’s an emergency!” she said. Desperation brought tears to her eyes. She couldn’t let Alex disappear again. This might be her only chance to see him, to make sure. He was so close.
“Well, if you wait here, your husband will be out as soon as he’s done. I can’t let you just wander around the studio,” he said.
“But my husband doesn’t know I’m here,” Corey said. “He doesn’t even know who I am. Please. I have to find him. Please.” Tears started falling and Michael and Sasha quieted down as they saw their mother cry.
“What do you mean your husband doesn’t know who you are?” the guard asked.
He thought she was crazy. Corey knew she was seconds away from being escorted out of the building. “On the show today, there’s a man who was in an accident and ended up with amnesia. Have you heard about him?” she asked.
“I don’t know what goes on in the studio every day, miss. I just keep people out that don’t belong in there.” He reached for his radio and Corey panicked.
“Please,” she shouted. “The man, he’s my husband. He disappeared a year ago. I’ve been looking for him this whole time. If he leaves before I can see him, I may never find him again. Please, you have to help me.”
“Mommy,” Michael whispered, “are we going to see Daddy?”
She looked up at the security guard. He held the answer.
“Just a minute,” he said. Reaching up to his radio, Corey prayed he wasn't calling for someone to drag her away. Instead, he asked if there was a guest on the show that day with amnesia. The voice that crackled over the radio said there was. Hope sprang up in Corey’s heart and her eyes begged the guard to trust her.
Shaking his head, he spoke into the radio again. “There’s a woman out here who says she’s the guy’s wife. She wants to see him.”
There was a brief moment of silence before the other voice answered. “I’ll send someone down for her.”
A young man arrived a few seconds later and hurried Corey and the kids through the building.
“We need to hurry. They’re already halfway through the interview,” the man said. “Do you have a picture or some identification that proves this guy is your husband?”
“Yes, I do!” Digging through her purse, Corey pulled out her wallet and tore out her driver’s license to prove who she was, and a family picture that included Alex. It had been taken a few months before he disappeared.
The man leading them took the license and picture. Holding up the license, he looked back at Corey and nodded, then held up the photo she had given him and compared it to one he had brought with him. Corey stared at the newer picture over his shoulder. It was Alex. He looked a little different. There were scars he didn’t have before, which almost made her start crying again to see them, and his face was fuller than it had been a year ago, but it was him.
Remembering Sarah, Corey pulled her phone back out and asked if she was still there. “Yeah, I’m here,” Sarah said. The tone of her voice caught Corey’s attention. Something was wrong.
“What is it, Sarah?”
The man leading them suddenly stopped and stepped aside, revealing Alex sitting on the couch next to the woman who had rescued him. Corey’s joy at seeing him almost completely blocked out everything else. Almost. The woman next to him was holding his hand. She was looking over at him the way Corey used to look at Alex. She was in love with him. In between questions, he looked over at her. The way he looked at her said it all. He loved her, too.
“Corey,” Sarah said, “Alex and the woman, they’re engaged.”
The last whole piece of Corey’s heart crumbled away. Michael yanked on her hand and said something she didn’t hear, but his voice drew Alex’s attention.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Unexpected Guests
Anne asked John something, but a flurry of movement behind the camera caught the corner of his eye. He glanced over at the small boy waving at him. He looked…familiar. He was holding someone’s hand. Traveling up the hand that held him, John saw her. Her dark waves rippled around her crestfallen face. Their eyes met and tears spilled down her cheeks.
Everything started falling into place and John felt himself smile. “Corey,” he whispered.
Falling to her knees, she let go of the children’s hands and they ran forward.
“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”
John slid off the couch and dropped to his knees as they reached him. They clambered up the steps, burying John in an avalanche of hugs and kisses. “Daddy, we missed you,” Michael cried. “We didn’t know where you were!”
Sasha hung around his neck, kissing John wherever she could reach him. “Lub you, Daddy!” she said between kisses. John cried. She was talking and walking. He had missed it all. Looking up, he saw Corey walking shakily toward them. She wasn't looking at him, though, she was looking past him. At Gretchen.
Spinning around, John stared at Gretchen. Her hands were shaking even as she pressed them against her mouth in disbelief. There was pain in her eyes, but there was joy, too. She knew. Gretchen looked up over John’s shoulder and he turned to see Corey standing to the side. She looked so unsure. Standing up with Michael and Sasha still hanging off of him in different places, he reached out to her.
Corey started crying uncontrollably as she pressed herself against him. It wasn't until John saw his tears falling on her shoulder that he realized he was doing the same thing. “Do you know who I am, Alex?” Corey asked between sobs.
Alex. That was his real name. Alex Turner.
Pulling back, he looked into her eyes, the ones he had seen so many times without knowing who they belonged to. The love he had seen in the memories was still there, maybe even brighter than before. “I knew as soon as I saw you,” he whispered.
“Where did you go?” she asked. “How did you end up in New Mexico?”
John’s memories were reemerging, but it was like someone had just dumped them into his head. They were jumbled and fuzzy, but he thought most of them were there. “The painting,” he said, piecing together the days before everything disappeared. “The painting we saw at the charity benefit, the one you loved so much.”
Corey shook her head in confusion.
“I found the painter,” John said. His head felt light despite the years’ worth of memories weighing on his mind. Having them back made him giddy. “The painter lived in New Mexico and I commissioned him to do a painting for you.”
“But, Alex, why didn’t you tell me where you were going?” Corey asked. “You took out ten thousand dollars and just disappeared. We searched the whole state, the neighboring states, but we couldn’t find you.”
All those months of being angry that no one had ever found him, and it was his fault.
“I had the painting done for your birthday, but I didn’t want you to find out about it, so I took out the cash, because I knew how closely you kept track of money, and drove to an airport outside of town to fly to New Mexico. The artist lived in some little town in the middle of nowhere. I was going to pick up the painting,” John said. “I wanted to pick it up myself because I didn’t want it showing up at the house and you seeing it. It was supposed to be a surprise.”
“What happened?” Gretchen asked quietly. “How did you end up lying in the middle of the road?”
He looked over at Gretchen and felt crushed all over again. She stood there so quietly. Determined to be gracious, she was standing with hands clenching each other so tightly her fingers were white. John could tell she was dying to scream or cry, anything to show how she felt, but she also had been the one who wanted so badly to find out who John was. The bittersweet reality of it finally happening was plain on her face.
“I picked up the painting, but I got lost when I tried to head back to Albuquerque and couldn’t get any cell reception. I guess I turned the wrong way and ended up heading north instead,” John said. “I got a flat tire and the wrong group of people stopped to help me.”
Memories of the hulking men walking up to John sent a shiver down his spine. The leader asked if John needed help, and John pretended he was fine even though he had never changed a tire in his life. One of them picked up the tire iron from the ground, but instead of putting it to work on the tire, he turned it on John. Phantom pain shot through his shoulder as he remembered the first blow landing.
John fell right away, but they didn’t stop. Shielding his head only ended with the blow smashing into his forearm. They moved onto his legs and body after that. John could feel his leg snapping as the tire iron hit it. He managed to block out most of the other kicks and hits by slipping into near unconsciousness.
Vaguely, he remembered someone taking his wallet and keys, and driving off. He still wasn’t sure whether someone had been changing the tire as the beat him up, or if he was just lying on the ground in pain for a lot longer than he thought, but either way, John knew they were leaving him for dead.
Until Gretchen found him.
“Excuse me,” Anne said with an amused expression on her face. “Would you all like to sit down and fill me in on what’s happening here?”
John turned around and realized that while they were all talking, the petite loveseat had been switched out for a full sized couch. Scooping Michael and Sasha up into his arms, he carried them toward the couch and sat down dead center. He chose the spot on purpose and watched Gretchen and Corey both sit on opposite sides of him. Gretchen put a comforting hand on his thigh as Corey touched his shoulder hesitantly.
“John, or Alex, apparently, would you like to introduce us to our unexpected guests?” Anne asked.
Hugging his squirming children tightly, John turned them to face Anne. “These two rascals are Michael and Sasha.” His voice caught as Sasha planted a slobbery kiss on his cheek. “These are my children.”
“We missed Daddy,” Michael said. “He was hiding and we didn’t know where he went, but now we found him.”
“Daddy!” Sasha yelled as she threw up her hands.
Anne smiled at them and looked over at Corey.
John took a deep breath and met Corey’s eyes. “And this is Corey Turner, my wife.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
Numb
Numb was an understatement by that point. Gretchen could see her hand on John’s leg, but she couldn’t feel it. Little Sasha smiled at her over John’s shoulder, and she knew she smiled back, but Gretchen’s face felt frozen. John tried to warn her, but she didn’t listen. She pushed him to come to New York and this was her reward. His wife and two beautiful children.
In a way, it really was a reward. John deserved to find his family. Losing him like they did would have torn Gretchen apart. A year spent worrying about whether he was dead or alive, she couldn’t imagine a worse form of torture. And the children, living for a year without their father. Their exuberant faces told everyone in the room exactly how much they had missed having him in their lives.
John had warned Gretchen, but would she really have stopped him from coming even if she had believed him?
After Steve, the hurt spiraled quickly into shame and depression. Gretchen was convinced she would be broken forever, it hurt so badly. This was nothing like that. Her entire body was wracked with twisting anguish from the inside out, but it was different. The pain was ten times worse than it had been after Steve, but it was a new kind of pain. She hadn’t been betrayed this time. She had just lost. The difference that made was astounding.
Steve took away Gretchen’s love and belief in herself, and tossed her aside. Even though Corey had walked into the studio intent on finding her husband, she wasn't taking anything away from Gretchen. Gretchen was giving something up. Maybe if it had just been Corey who’d showed up looking for the man Gretchen loved, she would have been willing to fight for him. Yes, he still would have been married, but he was hardly the same person he was before. Even then, Gretchen might not have been able to put another woman through losing someone as amazing as John.
But Corey hadn’t shown up alone. Michael and Sasha had come too, bouncing with joy at the thought of having their father back. Even little Sasha, who would have been too small to really even understand that her daddy was gone, hung on John with such pure happiness Gretchen knew Corey had kept John alive in their hearts the whole time he was gone. She hadn’t given up on him, and neither had his children. They wanted him back as desperately as Gretchen wanted to keep him. Faced with a wife and two children, Gretchen knew she was the one who had to give in. Every moment spent with John after meeting them would only be torture knowing what she had pulled him away from.
Anne had been talking to the others for a few minutes already, but one question brought Gretchen out of her thoughts.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked John. “You’re sitting here with your children on your lap and the two women you love on either side of you. What comes next?”
Everyone looked to John for an answer, but Gretchen knew he wasn't the right person to give it.
“He’s going to go home with his wife and children,” she said.
They all turned to stare at Gretchen. She wouldn’t have been surprised to hear they had completely forgotten she was there. Anne raised an inquisitive eyebrow. Corey looked as though she were about to faint, which she probably was, but John echoed Gretchen’s pain.
“Gretchen,” he whispered. “Please.”
His face begged her not to give up so quickly. He still loved her, even sitting with his family, even holding his wife’s hand. That knowledge took away the harsh edge of the pain radiating through Gretchen’s body. She would always treasure his love for her, but she couldn’t claim it anymore. He loved them both, but he could only keep one of them.
“You have to go, John. There’s nothing else to do now,” Gretchen said.
Passing his daughter off to his wife, John slid next to Gretchen and took her hands in his. Corey stiffened at the gesture, but gave John the space he needed.
Touching his head against hers, he held Gretchen in that simple embrace. She could feel his labored breaths wash across her face, and part of her was relieved to know it was as hard for him as it was for her. Slowly, Gretchen pulled away from him and held his face in her hands.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Gretchen. I don’t want to leave you,” John said.
“But you don’t want to leave them either,” she said.
“No. I can’t do that either.” His chin shook in her hands. The tears finally broke free. “I love you, Gretchen.”
He truly did. “I love you too, John. And I’ll never forget you, ever, but I have to say goodbye now.”
Gretchen’s hands fell away from his face and she stood. Nobody moved to stop her from leaving as she walked off the set. Managing to keep her composure
long enough to make it to the hall, Gretchen lost it when she passed out of view. Her clicking heels sounded like thunder as she ran down the hall. The green room where they had waited stood open and she ran in. Pushing the door closed behind her with her back, Gretchen slid down the door and sobbed.
Anne wrapped up the interview, but John didn’t hear anything she said. The image of Gretchen walking away from him blocked out everything else. Knowing Gretchen was right didn’t stop the overwhelming flood of pain crashing into him. He couldn’t leave his family. Not only would it have been incredibly wrong to leave them, he didn’t want to give them up. He had already missed so much of his children’s lives. He had lost so much time with Corey, too. Faint lines around her eyes that didn’t used to be there told the story of how hard the past year had been on her.
John wanted to erase Corey’s pain, but at the same time he would never give up the memories he had of his time with Gretchen. Gretchen was as much a part of him as Corey and the kids ever were. How could he give her up? There was no other choice, though.
“Daddy, why are you crying?” Michael asked. “Aren’t you happy we found you?”
Wiping away tears John hadn’t noticed until Michael pointed them out, he picked up his son and set him in his lap. He was so much bigger than he remembered. There was a seriousness to him that had never been there before. “Of course I’m happy you found me, buddy. I missed you so much, and Sasha and Mommy, too,” he said.
“Then why are you crying?” he asked.
Corey took Michael off John’s lap and hugged him. “Daddy misses his friend, Michael. It makes him sad that his friend left, just like we were sad when Daddy left.”
“Is his friend missing, too?” Michael asked.
Corey smiled, though the corner of her mouth was tucked between her teeth. John knew she was biting her cheek to help keep herself from crying. It had to be killing her even more to see John hurting so much as he watched Gretchen leave. He had already put her through so much, and he wanted to spare her anymore pain, but John couldn’t forget Gretchen that easily, even for Corey.