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Her eyes welled over.
“I don’t mean you any harm. Honest. I just need to know.”
“I had lost all of my memory when I woke up. They said it would come back in months’ time, but it never has. I’ve had flashes of things that don’t make any sense. I wanted to do research, see if I could find if I had a family. I was told the research came up empty, no matches. Seems that I’m a one of a kind.”
“Impossible. Who told you that?”
“Jakob.”
“And you gave him the vials after you were tested, or the swabs, or whatever?”
“The hospital did it.”
“And he arranged it.”
She stared at her lap and nodded. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Harper wanted to take her in his arms and reassure her, but that was risking more than he could afford.
“You have a sister in Seattle and two nephews who used to call me all the time and ask me if I was okay. You have co-workers at the hospital you worked at. People who knew you from the group of health professionals who helped to tend to victims of floods, natural disasters, and war in third world countries. They all miss and love you. Everyone knows you as Lydia. My wife.”
She looked up at him in pain. He reached over and grasped one of her hands on the table. “We were very much in love. See if you can find any of that there. Focus on it.”
She withdrew her hand, tired, confused, and fearful.
“Jakob paid for my care. He is responsible for my life. He agreed to help me find my family, and when he couldn’t find anyone, he gave me a place to live, gave me something I loved doing. I never knew anything about nursing. I hate the sight of blood and nearly faint when I see it.”
“No wonder.” He tapped the picture, showing the huge stain covering most of her chest. “So you enjoy being a street vendor? Or do you do something else?”
“I teach gardening classes. I love to garden—it’s the first thing I started doing when I recovered that seemed to make me feel whole. Until then, I was going crazy, searching for bad guys in crowds and looking for someone close by who wanted to kill me.”
A tiny flicker of fire began to spread, warming his wounded heart. She had gotten in touch with one of her loves. Now, if he could somehow get her to remember another—if he had time. Maybe she never would. He had to face that fact.
“I understand. That would be horrible, wake up and not know who you are. How did you get your name?”
“The hospital said they found something on me. A wristband or something. Anyway, this all happened here in Italy. Not in Africa. I’ve never been to Africa.”
“Oh, but you have,” he said, again tapping on the picture. “And you know who that is. So now tell me, what is the truth, hmm?”
“But why would he be so good to me? Pay for all those surgeries, stand by me through it all? He was kind. He’s protective of me. His job is to keep me safe. You’re asking me to distrust someone who has been keeping me safe now for months. He’s selfless.”
Harper considered several things. He could go either way. He had some photographs he could show her, but she could easily discount them as not belonging to what Jakob really did in life. He could ask a bunch of questions about him and what he did with his time while she was working in her garden. But would she accept it or go running back to his arms. If that happened, they’d disappear forever, especially if she told him what Harper had revealed about their marriage.
He decided on another tactic.
“When I met you at the cart, you asked me not to talk about knowing you from the past in front of Jakob. Why did you do that?”
“You’re an American. I asked you that, remember? I guess just a romantic idea of Americans, since I was told I must have been raised there. They guessed I was here on holiday when the accident happened.”
“What accident?”
“The auto accident. I hit a truck with a load of rebar in the back, and several pieces came through the windshield and pinned me. Nicked my heart. Jakob paid for a transplant after I was stabilized. My heart was healed but still significantly damaged. It was going to fail.”
“How did you get those round fleshy scars to the side?”
She reached into her blouse and let her fingers run over the scars. He could see she was circling the edges with her forefinger, lost in thought.
“The rebar.”
“No, ma’am. Those are gunshot wounds. Close range, probably a .22. You were lucky it was low caliber.”
