Now, as he drove home, he reminded himself that retrograde amnesia was a common short-term side effect of severe brain injury.
Short term. Those words were the ledge he tried to hold on to, but they kept crumbling beneath the weight of his fear.
What if she never remembered him or the kids?
He concentrated on breathing; it didn’t seem like much, but if he didn’t think about it, he stumbled into a place where panic was inches from his face, where he had to draw in great, sucking breaths just to survive.
Who are you?
Would he ever forget those words? Forget the pain that knifed through him in that single, horrifying moment when she’d said Julian’s name … and then asked Liam who he was.
He knew that her condition was purely medical in nature, a lapse in the function of her traumatized brain. But he was a man as well as a doctor, and the man in him felt like any man would feel. As if in twelve years of life together, of moments big and small, of a love that was enacted in errands and dinners and bedtime conversations, Liam had left no mark on her at all.
As if his love were like the waves that shifted and shaped, but never really changed the shore.
He was being foolish. She loved her children with every strand of her soul, and she had forgotten them, too—
No, that wasn’t right. She’d only forgotten Bret; Liam’s son. She remembered Jacey. And Julian.
He couldn’t shake a terrible, rising panic that in the end, his love would count for nothing. And what would he tell his children? They’d been through so much pain already, so much fear. Poor Bret had courageously visited her day after day, singing her favorite songs to her, waiting for a smile. It would crush him to discover that his mom didn’t remember him. One blank look and Bret would crumble.
Jacey would try to handle this like an adult, but inside, where it mattered, she would break like a little girl. She would understand that everything she and Mike had shared was gone. Every talk, every memory that entwined their lives would be Jacey’s alone now.
Liam couldn’t even think about his own fear right now; it was too overwhelming. “Please, God,” he whispered, “we can’t take this, too. It’s too much …”
The windshield wipers thumped in front of him, punctuating the silence in the car. A light snow began to fall, patterning the glass, piling up on the edges of the wiper’s sweep.
He flipped on the radio. “Memories” by Barbra Streisand blared from the speakers.
He snapped it off. Christ, what was next—“As Time Goes By”?
The snow was coming faster now. He didn’t see his own driveway until he was practically on top of it.
He put the car in four-wheel drive and lowered his speed, maneuvering carefully over the bumpy gravel road and into his own garage.
At the mudroom door, he paused, taking a moment to collect himself, then he pushed into the house. “Hello,” he called out. “I’m home. ”
He heard the scurrying sound of slippered feet on the hardwood floor. Rosa appeared, wearing one of Mike’s old saddle club aprons over a black house-dress. “Buenos noches,” she said, wiping a hand across her brow, leaving a snowy trail of flour across her skin. “I am making the … biscuits for dinner. You would like a cup of coffee, sí? Or a glass of wine?”
“Where are the kids?”
“Jacey will be home any momento. Bret is upstairs in the shower. Would you like—”
“Mike woke up today. ”
She gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth. “Dios mio, it is a miracle. How is she?”
Liam didn’t know how to take all the information of this day and mold it into an ordinary sentence. In the end he simply said it: “She didn’t recognize me, Rosa. ” He could hear the terrible ache at the edge of his voice; it didn’t sound like him at all. “Julian … she recognized Julian. ”
Rosa’s hand fell slowly, slowly to her side, where her fingers curled into a tight fist. “What does this mean?”
“I could give you a bunch of technical explanations, but the bottom line is that her memory has failed. She seems to think she’s twenty-four and still married to Julian. She thinks Jacey is still a baby. ”
Rosa was staring at him with a familiar look; it was the look of a patient who’d just received devastating news. She desperately wanted him to grant her hope. “This will get better, though. ¿Sí?”
“We hope it’s temporary. ” He put the tiniest emphasis on the word hope. “Usually people get their memories back. ”
“So she does not remember you or the children or all the years she’s been away from him. ”