Seeing him again

VALERIE

She hadn’t noticed me yet.

I stood just inside the doorway, one hand still on the frame, and looked at her.

My mother sat by the window in a pale blue cardigan that looked too big on her now. Her hair was thinner than I remembered, pulled back loosely. She was staring out at the small garden like she was waiting for something, or someone. The afternoon light caught the side of her face and made her look older than she should have.

A whole year.

I had been gone a whole year and she had been right here the entire time.

My throat tightened. I didn’t move. I just watched her for a few more seconds, afraid that if I spoke too soon the moment would break and she might not know who I was.

Then she turned her head slightly, still not looking at the door, and I saw the familiar line of her profile.

I took a quiet breath and stepped further into the room.

She turned her head.

For a second her eyes just rested on me without changing. Then recognition flickered across her face.

I let out a breath of relief

She knows.

She still knows me.

“Valerie…” she said, her voice thin but clear.

I crossed the room before I could think twice and wrapped my arms around her. She felt smaller than I remembered, more fragile, but the second I held her the years collapsed. She still smelled the same…that quiet mix of lavender lotion and clean soap she’d used for as long as I could remember.

Her arms came up slowly and settled around me. One hand moved to the back of my head, fingers gently threading through my hair the way she used to when I came home from school tired and she didn’t ask questions — she just did this until I felt steady again.

I closed my eyes and stayed there, breathing her in.

“You came back,” she whispered against my shoulder.

I pulled back just enough to look at her face. Her eyes were watery, but she was smiling.

“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice catching. “I’m so sorry it took me this long.”

She shook her head and reached up to cup my cheek with one hand.

I sat down on the edge of the bed beside her chair, still holding one of her hands. For a while neither of us spoke. Until she broke the silence.

“Where did you go?”

I never intended to leave you.

I lost my memory in a car accident, and it only came back a few days ago, and I have spent the entire year since not knowing my own name, and I am so sorry, so unbearably sorry, that you had to sit here every single day without any idea whether your daughter was alive.

That was the truth, the whole devastating shape of it, sitting right behind my teeth.

But I didn’t say any of it.

My mother wasn’t okay. Hadn’t been fully okay in years, not since my father died and something in her mind had quietly rearranged itself around the loss. I didn’t know how much worse the last year alone might have made things. I didn’t know what a truth this large might do to whatever fragile stability she’d managed to hold onto without me here. Telling her the real answer felt less like honesty and more like a risk I had no right to take with her.

“I traveled,” I said instead, which wasn’t technically a lie. “I took a little time away. I never meant for it to be this long. I never meant to make you worry.”

She smiled at that, small and knowing.

“I know you didn’t abandon me. The boy came over… he told me you would come back. And you did.”

I frowned slightly.

“Which boy, Mom?”

“That boy from your school.” Her smile widened a little, distant and fond. “The one you told me you’ve loved since college.”

My stomach dropped.

The thing about my mother, the thing I’d learned to navigate carefully in the years since my father passed, was that her mind had gotten stuck somewhere in the past, tangled around the version of events that hurt least to remember. She didn’t remember my father dying, not really, not in any way that stayed with her. To her I was sometimes still nineteen, still fresh out of my first semester, still telling her breathless stories about a boy in one of my classes who’d been unexpectedly kind to me.

There was only one boy she could mean.

Roman.

“Roman told you I’d be back?” I asked carefully, and she nodded, delighted, like she was handing me good news.

“Yes.” She lifted a hand and pointed toward the small vase sitting on her windowsill, full of white peonies just beginning to open. “He came not long ago. Brought me those.”

My heart did something complicated and unwelcome, twisting somewhere behind my ribs.

So much for having nothing left to do with him.

Roman had been coming here. All this time, while I was five hours away learning how to be a person with no last name, he had apparently been walking into this room, sitting where I was sitting now, bringing her flowers and letting her believe whatever story helped her hold onto hope.

I killed the small, traitorous flutter that tried to rise in my chest before it could fully form.

He was still the same man who had let an entire marriage go quiet around me while I waited for him to notice. A few visits to my mother didn’t rewrite three years of feeling invisible in my own home. Or the years of empty seats across from me at dinner, or the miscarriage he’d disappeared further into instead of grieving beside me.

I was still going to divorce him.

I would.

“Mom,” I said gently, squeezing her hand, needing to steer us somewhere steadier before my own thoughts pulled me under. “Tell me how you’ve been. Tell me everything.”

She sighed happily, settling back into her chair, already reaching for some memory to hand me. For a little while I let myself just be her daughter again and nothing else. She soon drifted off to sleep, her hand still loosely wrapped around mine, and I sat there for a while just watching her breathe, memorizing the rise and fall of it like I was afraid it might stop the second I looked away.

That was when the door creaked open.

I turned, expecting a nurse but It wasn’t a nurse.

My heart went completely still.

It was Roman.

He stood in the doorway like he genuinely believed he might be looking at a ghost, one hand still braced on the frame, his eyes locked on me with an expression I’d never once seen on his face in three years of marriage.

Not distant.

Not distracted.

Just raw, unfiltered shock.

“You…” His voice came out low. “You’re back.”

“Yes.” The word felt strange leaving my mouth, too small for the moment it was supposed to fill. “Yes, I am.”

It was, without question, the most awkward silence I had ever sat inside of.

“When did you come back?” he finally asked.

“Today.”

He nodded slowly, like the answer required more processing than a single word should have. His eyes moved briefly to my mother, sleeping peacefully in her chair, then back to me, like he was trying to work out how long I’d been sitting here, how much of this reunion he’d already missed.

“Oh.” He cleared his throat, glancing toward the small side table near the window. “I forgot something. I came to pick it up.”

He pointed toward a slim leather folder resting against the base of the lamp, something I hadn’t even noticed until now.

He crossed the room, picked it up, and for a moment just stood there holding it, like he wasn’t quite ready to leave yet either.

He looked at me once more.

“It’s good to see you, Valerie.”

“Yeah,” I managed.

His phone rang before either of us could say anything else, cutting through the silence like it had been waiting for the exact right second to interrupt. He glanced down at the screen, jaw tightening the same way it had in that parking lot, and gave me one last look I couldn’t quite read.

Then he left.

I let out a long breath the second the door clicked shut.

A year. A full year without seeing him, without a single word, and that was all he’d had to offer. A year, and it took exactly one phone call to send him walking straight back out of the room.

Some things, apparently, hadn’t changed at all.

The divorce.

I needed to talk to him about it. Soon. Before I let this trip back into his orbit turn into anything more complicated than it already was.

I stayed with my mother for a few more hours after that, until the light outside her window had shifted from gold to gray, until her breathing had settled into the deep, even rhythm of real sleep. Before I left, I checked in with the nurses at the front desk, promising I’d be back regularly now that I was in the city, and thanking them for everything they’d done in my absence.

One of them, an older woman, mentioned Roman’s visits without me even asking. Confirmed what my mother had already told me…that he’d been coming by consistently the entire year I was gone.

I filed that away somewhere I didn’t want to look at too closely and left.

Miles had already settled things for me before I even got on the road, despite my protests that I could handle finding my own place. He’d found me a small furnished apartment which was only a short drive from Willow Brook. I let myself in that evening, dropped my bag by the door, and took a slow lap around the space, making a mental list of things to pick up the next day.

Toiletries.

Groceries

A few things to make the apartment feel more like mine

And somewhere on that same list, in ink a little heavier than the rest, I noted that I needed to arrange a time to go back to the penthouse.

Roman’s penthouse.

My old one.

I needed to pack my things from the penthouse.

It was going to need to happen soon, especially with the divorce still sitting unfinished between us.

My plan for New York was simple, or at least it was supposed to be.

Take care of my mother.

Divorce Roman.

Open a new café, something small and mine, and save enough to finally go back and finish the postgraduate degree I’d walked away from the day he proposed.

Build something that belonged only to me this time.

I’d already checked one thing off that list today. My mother, is safe

Miles had also helped line up a small storefront not far from the apartment, a modest space with good light and decent foot traffic, exactly the kind of place I could picture myself building something real out of. I was supposed to go see it tomorrow.

Two down. The rest could wait until morning.

For now, I needed sleep. I needed to be steady for whatever tomorrow decided to throw at me.

But there was someone else I needed to call first.

My best friend.

The only person in this city, aside from my mother, who I actually trusted to still know the real me underneath everything that had happened.

Zoey.

A small, tired smile pulled at my mouth as I pulled out my phone and found her number.