Page 228 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

“She goes by Sandra now.” I let her new name sit between us, rolling my tongue around it with slow ease. I tilted my head, watching his face contort. It was such a small thing, really. Just a name. Except it wasn’t, not to her. It was a reclamation.

“She’s doing so much better now. She’s getting the help she needs, and Liam says she looks happy.”

I smiled faintly.

“Actually happy.”

Michael’s expression tightened.

“They have a real relationship now. The kind you never thought they’d have. And guess what?”

His eyes lifted to mine.

“She hasn’t asked about Cassian in months.”

When she first started getting help, she still asked. Is he okay? Does he hate me? Will he ever forgive me? But as the weeks went by, she asked a little less. Then a little less again.

And eventually, she stopped asking altogether.

Instead, she started talking about other things—books she’d been reading, music she’d discovered, a painting class she was considering taking.

Normal things. Things that had nothing to do with him. Things that proved, more than anything else, that she had finally, truly let go.

She’d started becoming someone her father wouldn’t recognize.

Michael was glaring at me across the glass. His jaw had gone rigid, his face pallid, his breathing shallow, every inch of him pulled taut as though sheer force of will might keep the rest of his carefully dismantled world from caving in around him. His eyes were dark with uncontained fury.

I smiled.

Wide. Bright.

“You hate this, don’t you?”

I leaned forward and rested my chin on my hand. “This is so fun.”

His eyes stayed fixed on mine.

I let the silence stretch.

Then, because apparently I had not yet reached my quota for ruining his day, I smiled again.

“Cassian and I are doing amazing, by the way.”

We were.

He’d moved into my apartment the week after I got my memories back. He said the house felt too sad—too many empty rooms, too many nights spent alone, too many ghosts lodged in its corners—and the apartment was smaller, warmer, filled to the brim with the life we were building together. He fit there. We fit there.

It wasn’t meant to be a permanent plan. We’d already started looking at houses, spending our weekends driving through neighborhoods we’d never visited before, wandering through empty rooms that didn’t belong to anyone yet. Imagining what they might become once they belonged to us.

We weren’t particularly picky about the house itself.

It just needed space. Space for a garden.

A big one.

My husband was becoming a professional. He had opinions about soil now. Strong ones. He talked about composting with the same intensity some people reserved for football, sent me articles about companion planting, and woke up early on Saturdays to tend to the tomatoes. Our tomatoes.

I watched Michael’s face. Watched as he processed it all. Watched as the truth settled into him, piece by piece. That his children were thriving without him, that the empire he had spent his entire life building was gone, that the son he had dismissed and the daughter he had used had somehow found their way back to each other after all these years.