Page 29 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

If Felicity wasn’t lying, then the doctor wasn’t lying either.

The accident had really happened. The years I’d been told were missing hadn’t been some elaborate joke designed to scare me. They were gone, locked somewhere inside my mind, leaving me with a life I had apparently lived but couldn’t remember.

And the man standing beside my bed really was my husband. My gaze shifted toward him, almost unwillingly.

My breathing came faster, each breath shallow and unsatisfying. The room seemed to sway around me, the sterile white walls losing their sharpness as dark spots gathered at the edges of my vision and spread inward.

I blinked hard, trying to clear them.

It only made everything blur further.

The machines beside me seemed to grow quieter, their beeping fading beneath the rushing in my ears. My head felt unbearably heavy, and I struggled to keep my eyes open.

“Alessia?”

His voice reached me from somewhere far away.

I tried to focus on it.

I couldn’t.

My vision narrowed to a tiny patch of light.

Then even that disappeared.

Everything went black.

Chapter 4

My narrowed eyes stayed fixed on him.

To his credit, he didn’t look away. He stood near the window with his arms folded, watching me with the same maddening composure he’d maintained since I’d opened my eyes.

I’d woken up a few hours earlier, and this time Felicity had come armed with evidence.

Photographs.

Text conversations.

Emails.

Our marriage certificate.

She had sat beside my bed and patiently walked me through nearly three years of a life I couldn’t remember living.

There was no escaping it anymore.

It was true.

Almost three years had vanished from my memory.

My brain still couldn’t wrap itself around the idea. Three years of birthdays, holidays, arguments, ordinary mornings, terrible days, happy days, conversations, places I’d apparently visited, people I’d apparently met.

Gone.

Just… gone.

It felt impossible to accept that an entire portion of my life could exist in photographs and messages while my own mind contained absolutely nothing of it.