CHAPTER FOUR: Her return

VALERIE

ONE YEAR LATER

“Table six needs a refill,” Erica called from behind the counter, not even looking up.

“On it.”

I grabbed the pot and made my way over, weaving around the same chairs I’d wiped down a hundred times by now. A year of mornings just like this one. Working a floor that wasn’t mine, in a city that wasn’t either, until somehow both of them just… were.

I used to think Boston was temporary. Somewhere to get my head straight before I figured out where I actually belonged. Instead it just quietly became my life. A job I didn’t hate. A version of me with nothing weighing it down.

Except that wasn’t true anymore. Not since three days ago.

I topped off the coffee at the window table, half-nodded at some guy complaining about the wind off the water, and let my brain do the thing it kept doing every few minutes now.

The memories had been leaking back for months. Small stuff. Like my name. A hallway I didn’t know. Someone’s voice saying my name. None of it went anywhere.

Three days ago it stopped being small.

It just hit. I was closing up the café and suddenly I had my whole name… not just Valerie, but Valerie Laurent and everything behind it came flooding in faster than I could keep up with.

College.

A husband I wanted to divorce.

A marriage that quietly ate me alive from the inside for years.

But here was the thing. I couldn’t remember what happened the day of the accident. It was like I remembered everything else except that one piece. Miles had taken me to see my doctor the same week the memories started surfacing, wanting to make sure whatever was happening in my head was actually safe to let happen. The doctor ran through it calmly. Selective amnesia, he called it. My brain had let everything else back in but sealed off that one day completely, some kind of built-in defense against whatever trauma was tied to it.

He said the memory might come back eventually.

Or it might not ever come back at all.

But the most important thing I remembered was my mom.

That’s the part that’s kept me up since. Her, sitting in some care home in New York with absolutely no idea where I went. A year. She went a whole year not knowing if I was alive.

I’d told Miles the second it came back to me. We’d agreed a long time ago… if my memory ever returned, I’d go back to New York. He didn’t try to talk me out of it. He just started helping me get ready to leave.

I was going back tomorrow

I just had to tell Erica, who’d hired me a year ago. This café had become something I was genuinely attached to, something that made me happy in a life I hadn’t chosen but had somehow built anyway. Now I had to walk away from it.

I set the pot down and took a breath.

There wasn’t a version of this conversation that wasn’t going to suck.

But it had to happen today.

*********

New York felt different.

Or maybe I was the one who had changed.

The city looked familiar in ways I couldn’t explain. Coming back felt like stepping into a life that had once belonged to me.

A life I wasn’t sure I wanted anymore.

Saying goodbye to Miles had been harder than I expected, but he had promised he’d come to New York in a few weeks. He had work that might keep him there for longer than planned anyway, which made leaving him behind feel slightly less final.

Miles had become one of the most important people in my life over the past year. He’d been there for my recovery, patient in a way I didn’t think I deserved, and somewhere along the way we’d gotten close. Close enough that we probably could have taken things further between us.

We never did mostly because I didn’t know what life I’d left behind in New York.

For all we knew, I could have been married with three children.

The marriage part turned out to be true.

I just happened to be divorcing him.

Roman.

I hadn’t allowed myself to think about him too much. Because whenever I did, everything I’d spent months trying to bury came rushing back.

The loneliness.

The waiting.

The nights I’d sat alone while he worked.

The way he slowly became more distant while I kept convincing myself that if I tried harder, loved him better, asked for less, maybe he’d finally look at me the way I’d always looked at him.

I remembered it all

But one question kept surfacing above all the rest.

Why hadn’t he come looking for me?

Was I really that easy to let go of? That forgettable, that disposable, that a whole year could pass and no one thought to look harder?

I was in New York now. I was going to divorce him properly, close that chapter, and start whatever came next.

But first, I needed to see my mother.

I checked my phone for the address of Willow Brook Care Home and I got a car there.

My heart sat somewhere up in my throat the entire ride, climbing higher with every block that passed.

My mom.

How had she been holding up? Did she even remember the last conversation we’d had before everything went dark? Did the staff know how to handle her on the days her mind wandered somewhere none of us could follow?

I stepped out of the car in front of the building, smoothing down my jacket, trying to steady myself for whatever version of her was waiting inside.

Just as I made my way toward the entrance, a man was walking out of it, phone pressed to his ear, dressed like he’d come straight from a boardroom. My steps slowed on their own, some old instinct in my body recognizing him before the rest of me caught up.

Roman.

He looked older. Not in a way that aged him exactly… if anything, the last year had sharpened him, carved away whatever softness used to sit in his face. His jaw looked more defined. He was still devastatingly handsome, more so than I remembered.

He hadn’t seen me yet.

There was a low hedge running along the side of the building and I ducked behind it without thinking twice, my heels sinking slightly into the mulch. My pulse was roaring in my ears. I peered through a gap in the hedge, watching him.

He paused near his car, one hand braced on the roof, the other still holding the phone to his ear. Whatever he was hearing on the other end made his jaw tighten, that same old tell I used to know better than my own reflection. For a second I almost forgot I was hiding, almost forgot why my whole body had gone rigid at the sight of him, and just watched the familiar shape of a man I used to memorize like scripture.

I wasn’t ready. That was the truth of it. I’d spent the entire drive over rehearsing what I’d say to my mother, bracing myself for however much of her had slipped away in a year, and I had nothing left prepared for him.

He ended the call, slid the phone into his jacket pocket, and glanced toward the entrance.

My stomach dropped straight through the ground.

For one terrifying second I was certain he’d seen me, that the hedge wasn’t nearly as generous as I’d hoped, that I was about to have this entire reunion happen in a parking lot with dead leaves stuck to my shoes and absolutely no idea what to say. But his gaze slid past the hedge without catching, and he circled around to the driver’s side instead, unlocking the car with a soft chirp.

I stayed crouched there until he drove off.

Only then did I straighten up, brush the mulch off my knees, and smooth down my coat like the last few minutes hadn’t happened.

I glanced toward the entrance.

Whatever Roman had been doing here… it wasn’t my problem anymore.

Not today.

Today was about my mother, and nothing else was allowed to get in the way of that.

Not memories.

Not questions I wasn’t ready to answer.

Not him.

I straightened my shoulders, walked past the hedge and made my way toward the doors.