Page 72 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

He opened his mouth, but I didn’t let him get a word out.

“Instead of turning to the person you built a life with, instead of telling your partner you were falling apart, you decided the best thing you could do was shut me out.” My laugh was short and bitter. “What kind of logic is that?”

He opened his mouth, then stopped. “I…” The words caught before he finally managed, “I didn’t want to stress you.”

“Compared to ignoring me?” The question came out cold and sharp. “You didn’t think that would stress me? You genuinely thought hiding everything from me, making me feel invisible, was better than sitting down and telling me what was happening in your life?”

I didn’t remember living that life. I didn’t remember the slow erosion of my spirit, the compromises I must have made, or the despair that had settled in piece by piece until there was barely anything of me left.

That woman was a stranger to me.

But the hurt wasn’t.

It lived somewhere beneath my ribs, deep enough that I didn’t need the memories to recognize it. A hollow ache spread through my chest, carrying the weight of a betrayal I had never witnessed and yet knew intimately.

That ache of being left behind. Of being shut out when all you wanted was to be let in.

And the bitterest irony of all was that after a lifetime of carefully avoiding any man who made me feel, even for a second, that I wasn’t respected or valued, I had ended up marrying one.

The woman I had been had chosen him.

She had trusted him.

She had believed he was the person she could lean on when life became too much.

But when his life began falling apart, he had shut her out and left her standing on the other side of the door—the very thing she had spent her life fearing.

And the ultimate humiliation?

That past version of me had stayed. She hadn’t left. She had become the very woman I swore I’d never be: tied to a man who didn’t appreciate her, probably making excuses for him, forgiving him when he didn’t deserve it.

My resolve crystallized, forged from anger and sadness into an unwavering decision.

Cassian could wear his remorse until it consumed him. He could drown beneath the weight of his own regret.

The woman who used to forgive him was gone.

He wasn’t the only one who had forgotten her.

His eyes glistened, and he blinked hard, fighting the moisture gathering there. “I—I don’t know how it happened. My intention was never to hurt you, Alessia. I never wanted that. I just didn’t want to pull you down with me. That was all I wanted.”

His eyes searched my face, desperate to find even the smallest sign that his words had reached me.

The explanation was as hollow as I felt.

“You should sign the papers, Cassian,” I said.

He turned his face away, staring at the wall, the floor, anywhere that wasn’t me. His shoulders rose with a shaky breath. When he finally looked back at me, his eyes were shining, the tears he had been fighting sitting dangerously close to spilling over.

“We were supposed to go to our laser tag place tomorrow,” he murmured.

For the entire past week, Cassian had been dragging me from one place to another, taking me through the old pieces of our life in the hope that one of them would spark a memory.

It had become his personal mission, a desperate tour through a past I couldn’t remember and he couldn’t stop trying to give back to me.

I’d felt a little bad for messing with him constantly, so I’d let him have this.

First, it was the café where we met. He led me to the exact table where we had once spent hours talking. He told me what we had ordered, what we had talked about, how easily the conversation had flowed between us. This time, we couldn’t make it past ten minutes before the silence became unbearable.