Chapter 3: Two Years, Gone

He opened his eyes after three weeks, and the first thing he did was ask for a woman who'd left him five years ago.

I'd lost count of the nights by then. Twenty-one, maybe twenty-two, all of them spent folded into the same chair beside his bed, my spine aching, my eyes raw from staring at the slow rise and fall of his chest, willing it to keep going. Margaret had stopped trying to make me eat in the second week. I just sat there, holding his hand, talking to him about nothing, because Dr. Reed said sound sometimes reached people even when nothing else could.

That morning, his fingers twitched in mine.

I came up out of my own exhaustion so fast my neck cracked. "Alex?"

His eyelids fluttered. Once. Twice. Then they opened, and for one perfect, suspended second, relief crashed through me so hard I nearly sobbed out loud.

"Alex, oh god, you're awake, you're really awake—"

His eyes found mine. Confused. Searching. Wrong, somehow, in a way I felt before I understood.

"Where's Serena," he said.

The words didn't make sense. I actually laughed, a short, startled sound, because surely I'd misheard him, surely three weeks of no sleep had finally cracked something in my own head. "What?"

"Serena." His voice scraped rough from disuse, but the urgency in it was unmistakable. He tried to sit up, wincing, his gaze sweeping the unfamiliar room. "Where is she? What happened? Why does my side hurt like this?"

"Alex, it's me." I leaned in close, gripping his hand tighter, like I could anchor him back into the right moment through touch alone. "It's Clara. You were attacked at the border, you've been unconscious for three weeks, you're safe now, you're home."

He looked at me the way you'd look at a stranger who'd wandered into your bedroom uninvited.

"I don't know you," he said.

The floor seemed to drop out from under the entire room.

"Alex, that's not funny." My voice came out thin, pleading, even as some cold, creeping understanding had already started crawling up my spine. "It's me. It's Clara. Your wife."

"My wife." He said the word like it tasted wrong in his mouth. His brows pulled together, that same crease I'd memorized over breakfast weeks ago, except now it carried no warmth, only suspicion. "I'm not married. I'm engaged. To Serena." His hand twisted free of mine like my touch had burned him. "Who are you? Why are you touching me like you know me?"

"Because I do know you." My voice cracked wide open. "Alex, please, look at me, really look. We've been married two years. Two years, you proposed to me by the lake, you said you couldn't remember your life before me—"

"Stop." He scooted back against the headboard, putting distance between us, his good hand braced against the mattress like he might need to defend himself. "Stop talking like you know things about me. I don't know who put you up to this, but I want Serena. I want someone to tell me what the hell is going on."

Dr. Reed appeared in the doorway then, drawn by the rising volume, and I watched his expression shift in real time from professional calm into something closer to dread.

"Alex." Dr. Reed's voice stayed level, careful, the voice you use on something wounded and unpredictable. "Do you know what year it is?"

Alex told him. Two years off. Two years exactly off, the precise length of time he'd spent loving me apparently erased clean from his memory like it had never happened at all.

"And who is this woman beside you?"

Alex's gaze flicked to me, cold and unfamiliar, and something inside my chest folded in on itself. "I don't know. She says she's my wife. I've never seen her before in my life."

The room tilted the way it had that morning weeks ago, except this time there was no hand on my stomach to steady me, no warm voice murmuring against my hair. Just the sound of my own heartbeat hammering too loud in my ears and the horrible, growing certainty that something had gone catastrophically, permanently wrong.

Margaret reached the doorway behind Dr. Reed, drawn by the commotion, and I watched her face do the same collapsing thing mine had just done. She knew her son's voice. She knew what it sounded like when he was lying, and this wasn't that. This was something far worse.

"Alex," she breathed, stepping closer, her hand pressed to her mouth. "Sweetheart, it's Mom. Do you know me?"

"Of course I know you." His relief at recognizing something, anything, was almost worse than his confusion had been. "Mom, what is going on? Why does everyone keep looking at me like I'm the one who's lost it?"

Margaret's eyes found mine over his shoulder, and in them I saw the confirmation of every fear suddenly clawing its way up my throat. She didn't have to say it. I already knew.

He'd lost two years.

He'd lost every memory we'd built together, every morning, every fight, every quiet moment that had turned an Omega orphan into someone worth loving. Gone, like none of it had ever existed.

I stood up slowly, my legs unsteady beneath me, and Alex watched me rise with the same wary suspicion you'd give a stranger backing out of your room.

"I'll let the doctor explain," I managed, though my voice barely held together by the end of the sentence. "I'll be right outside."

I made it exactly three steps into the hallway before my knees gave out, and I slid down against the cold stone wall, pressing my fist hard against my mouth to keep the sound trapped inside, because somewhere behind that door was a husband who didn't remember loving me, and somewhere inside me, impossibly, a secret he didn't even know existed yet.

I pressed my free hand flat against my stomach, the dizziness from weeks ago suddenly making horrible, devastating sense, and I understood, with a clarity sharp enough to cut, that I was about to fight for everything alone.