His Wife

Lena’s POV

I sat down.

Not gracefully. My legs just made the decision without consulting me and I found myself on the couch with no memory of crossing the room to get there. The cushion dipped under me and I stared at the wall and the running dog water stain and I breathed very carefully.

His wife.

I had been somebody’s wife.

This man’s wife.

“Say something,” Damien said. He hadn’t moved from the middle of the room. Like he was giving me space. Like he knew I needed it.

“Give me a second,” I said.

He gave me a second. Then another. I appreciated that more than I could say.

I turned it over in my mind. Selene Voss. His wife. I pressed on it the way you press on a bruise, slowly, to find out how much it hurts. Nothing came back. No warmth. No recognition. No sense of something returning to its right place.

Just the shaking in my hands and the ice in my chest.

“How long,” I said.

“We were together three years. Married for one.”

“And then I disappeared.”

Something moved across his face. “Yes.”

“That’s not the whole story,” I said.

“No.”

I looked at him. “Tell me the whole story Damien.”

He crossed the room slowly and sat in the chair across from me. Forearms on his knees. Eyes on the floor. The posture of someone about to say something they had rehearsed and dreaded in equal measure.

“We had a fight,” he said. “A bad one. I said things I can’t take back. You left that night and two days later someone found you in a hospital three states away with no memory and no ID and by the time I found out where you were the hospital said you’d already been discharged into temporary housing and then you were just.” He stopped. His throat moved. “Gone.”

I watched his face carefully.

He was telling the truth. Parts of it. The specific careful truth of someone leaving out the worst detail and hoping you won’t notice.

“What did you say to me,” I said. “In the fight.”

“Lena.”

“Selene,” I corrected sharply. The name felt foreign in my mouth but I used it anyway like a weapon. “What did you say to me.”

He looked up.

His eyes were doing that thing again. That held-together-barely thing.

“I told you I didn’t want you,” he said. “In front of people. I said it publicly and I meant it to hurt and it did.”

The words landed in my chest in a strange way. Not as new information. As confirmation. Like something that had been sitting in my body for two years finally had a shape.

“So you humiliated me,” I said. “In front of people. And then I ran and something happened to me on the way and I lost everything.”

“Yes.”

“And now you’re here.”

“Yes.”

“Why.” My voice came out harder than I intended. “You got what you wanted. I was gone. Why spend two years looking.”

He looked at me for a long time.

“Because I was wrong,” he said. “About everything. About you. About what I wanted. About who I was.” He leaned forward slightly. “And because there are things about that night you don’t know. Things that were done to you that weren’t your fault and weren’t mine either and you deserve to know them.”

My pulse was doing something unsteady.

“What things,” I said.

“Not yet.”

“Stop saying not yet to me.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” He held my gaze. “There are people who don’t want you to remember Selene. People who are very comfortable with you staying lost. And if I tell you everything at once before I know you’re safe then I’m putting you in danger.”

The room felt different suddenly. Smaller.

“What kind of people,” I said slowly.

He just looked at me.

And for the first time since he knocked on my door I felt something other than confusion or strange sad recognition.

I felt afraid.

Not of him.

Of whatever was standing behind him.

“You should have left me lost,” I said quietly.

“I know,” he said. “I almost did.”

He reached into his jacket and put something on the coffee table between us. A photograph. Worn at the edges. Creased down the middle like it had been folded and unfolded many times.

I looked at it.

A woman. Dark hair. Laughing at something off camera. Standing in a field somewhere green and wide. She looked free. She looked like someone who didn’t know yet what was coming.

She looked exactly like me.

My hands were shaking so hard the photograph blurred.

“That was three years ago,” Damien said softly. “Two months before everything fell apart.”

I picked it up with both hands.

Looked at my own face looking back at me from a life I couldn’t remember.

And somewhere deep and below thought, something that had been sleeping for two and a half years shifted.

Not waking. Not yet.

But turning over.

Like it heard something it recognized.