Chapter 2

Chapter 2 

ELENA

The doctor's footsteps hadn't even faded down the hall before I was already trying again.

"Can I at least see a photo?" I asked the nurse when she came back to check my IV. "Of him. Of anyone. My parents, my friends, anybody."

She didn't look up from the monitor. "I don't have access to anything like that."

"Then who does?"

"That's really a conversation for—"

"For who?" My voice cracked on the word, frustration bleeding through the panic. "Everyone keeps saying that. A conversation for who?"

She finally met my eyes, and for half a second I saw something honest there — not unkindness, but caution, the kind of caution you learn, not the kind you're born with. Then it was gone, folded back behind her professional calm.

"I'll let the case manager know you have questions," she said, and adjusted something on my chart instead of answering.

I lay back against the pillows, breathing hard, and tried a different angle. "Can I use a phone? I want to call someone. Anyone. I must have — I don't know, a friend, a sister—"

"There's no phone access on this floor." She said it fast, automatic, like she'd said it a hundred times to other people who weren't me. Then, like she realized she'd given me something without meaning to, she added, "It's a hospital policy. For patient privacy."

"What hospital doesn't let you use a phone?"

She didn't answer that one.

"Can someone bring me my phone, then? My things. Whatever I had on me."

"Personal items are being held for now." A pause. "Visitors are screened before they come up, and nothing leaves the floor without approval from upstairs. It's just how things are done for—" She stopped herself again, the sentence dying halfway, like she'd walked right up to the edge of something and caught her own foot before she fell in.

"For what?" I pressed. "For patients like me? What does that mean?"

"For security," she said, too smooth, too quick, and busied herself with the blanket at the foot of my bed instead of looking at me.

Approval from upstairs. I turned the phrase over in my head like a stone I couldn't put down. Hospitals didn't usually work that way, did they? Nurses didn't usually flinch when a patient asked for her own phone back. There was a shape to all of this, some structure holding the walls up around me, and I couldn't see it, only feel the edges of it pressing in.

I looked down at my hands, half hoping they'd tell me something my head wouldn't. And that was when I saw it — the faint pale line across the side of my palm, old and silvered, a scar I had absolutely no memory of getting. I turned my hand over, studied it in the flat hospital light. It wasn't small. Whatever had made it, it hadn't been nothing.

And then I saw what wasn't there. My ring finger was bare. No mark, no faint tan line, no dent in the skin where a ring might have sat for however many years I supposedly had a husband. Nothing. Just skin, unremarkable, like it had never worn anything at all.

That didn't match. If I was married — if there truly was a husband, — where was the ring? Had I taken it off? Had someone taken it off me? Had I never worn one to begin with?

I asked the nurse when she came back with a fresh bag for the IV. "This scar." I held up my palm. "Do you know what happened? And I'm not wearing a ring. If I'm married, shouldn't I have a ring?"

She glanced at my hand for exactly as long as it took to see it, then looked away. "I don't have your full medical history in front of me. You'd have to ask the doctor."

"And the ring?"

"I really couldn't say." She said it fast, the words running together, and there it was again — that particular flatness, the sound of someone choosing their words like they were walking across ice. She left before I could ask anything else, the door swinging shut behind her with a soft, final click.

I lay there a long time after that, staring at the ceiling tiles, trying to force memory the way you'd force a stuck drawer, jerking at it and getting nothing but a jammed, aching feeling behind my eyes. Nothing came. No ring, no wedding, no face to put behind the word husband. Just the scar on my hand, foreign and old, and the absence where a ring should have been, and the sense — growing heavier by the hour — that everyone around me knew far more about my life than I did, and had all silently agreed not to tell me.

The room had gone dim with early evening by the time I heard voices outside my door. Low, quick, pitched to not carry — except the door wasn't shut all the way, and hospital doors, I was learning, were not as solid as they looked.

"—still hasn't said anything about the actual timeline," one voice was saying. A woman. Not the nurse who'd been in with me; a different one, older-sounding.

"She's not faking it this time," the second voice said. "I've seen her fake it before. This isn't that."

My whole body went still. She's not faking it this time. As if there had been other times. As if I had a history of exactly this, lying in this exact kind of bed, claiming exactly this kind of thing, and being disbelieved for a reason.

"You really think it's real?" the first voice asked.

"I think the scans back her up. I think whatever happened out there did something."

A pause. The kind of pause that has weight to it.

"Does he know?" the second voice asked, quieter now, quiet enough that I had to hold my own breath to catch it. "Does he know she's not remembering? Not even him?"

Not even him.

My heart slammed once, hard, against my ribs. Not even him — like there was a specific him whose absence from my memory mattered more than anyone else's. Like whatever I'd forgotten, forgetting him was the part that would matter most, the part someone needed to be told about carefully, the part that came with consequences.

"I don't know," the first voice said. "I don't want to be the one to tell him if he doesn't."

"You think he'd be angry?"

There was a silence then, and something about the quality of it — the way neither of them rushed to fill it — told me more than an answer would have. Fear didn't always sound like fear. Sometimes it sounded like nothing at all, like two people choosing not to finish a sentence because they both already knew how dangerous it was to say out loud.

"I'm not finishing that thought," the first voice finally said, so low I almost lost it, and then footsteps, moving away, fast, the conversation folding shut like a door.

I lay frozen in the bed, staring at the gap under my door where the hallway light spilled in, my pulse hammering in my ears.

Not even him.

Would he be angry.

I didn't have a name yet. I didn't have a face I could hold onto, . But I understood, in that moment, with a certainty that had nothing to do with memory at all, that whoever he was — this husband nobody would name — the people around me weren't just being careful.

They were afraid of him.