Page 82 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

What about the Alessia who was here now? The woman standing in front of me with her own thoughts, her own pain, her own perfectly valid reasons for wanting to walk away from me? Why had I decided that the person she used to be mattered more than the person she was now? Why had I treated her present feelings as some temporary inconvenience standing between me and the past I wanted back?

I had spent so much time fighting for the wife I remembered that I had stopped seeing the woman in front of me. I kept reaching backward, desperate to drag our old life back into existence, while she was standing right there, trying to survive the life she’d been thrown into.

I wasn’t fighting for her.

I was fighting for the version of her I wanted back.

And in doing so, I had been trampling all over the person she had become.

“You are a profoundly selfish man, Cassian Sterling.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, but there was nowhere to hide from it.

She was right.

I am selfish.

I’d told myself I was thinking about us. That getting her memories back was the key to everything. Once she remembered, she could be furious with me. She could hate me for every mistake I’d made. She could finally understand what had happened, and then I could apologize to the woman I’d actually hurt.

I had built an entire justification around that idea until I almost believed it myself.

But underneath all of it was the same ugly truth.

I wanted her back.

I wanted the woman who had loved me, trusted me, built a life with me. I wanted the memories that made me her husband again. I wanted to hear my name in her voice with recognition instead of confusion. I wanted the past restored because I could not bear what the present demanded of me.

If I had truly been thinking about her, I would have stopped trying to force the past into her hands. I would have asked what it felt like to wake up inside a life she didn’t recognize. I would have asked what frightened her, what confused her, what she needed from me now.

Instead, I’d expected her to accept a marriage she had no memory of and pick up where we’d left off.

I had not been giving her a way forward.

I had been trying to pull her backward because I was too afraid to follow her into the present.

I should go after her.

No.

Maybe… maybe I shouldn’t.

Maybe the most selfless thing I could finally do for her was stay the hell away. Sit in the silence. Let her go. Let myself feel every second of it instead of finding another excuse to run after her and call it love.

I kept telling myself I needed to go after her because I was scared the accident would repeat itself. But deep down, I knew she would be safe. The part of me that wanted to chase her was just terrified of accepting the real, final truth.

I wasn’t afraid something would happen to her. I was afraid of what would happen to me if I stopped following her. If I stood there and let her leave, I would have to face the possibility that there was nothing left for me to fix. Nothing I could say. Nothing I could do. No memory I could bring back that would make her love me again.

For months, I hadn’t given my wife enough of my time. I had buried myself in work and convinced myself there would always be another day to make things right. I’d been so consumed by everything I was trying to hold together that I hadn’t noticed how much of Alessia I was losing in the process.

Then the accident happened, and I made the same mistake in a different way.

I had been so obsessed with getting my Alessia back—the Alessia who remembered our marriage, our history, our love—that I never stopped to consider the woman standing in front of me now.

Every thought, every piece of the truth I had spent so long refusing to look at, left me more ashamed than the one before it. There was no excuse waiting at the end of any of it. No explanation that could make what I had done feel less selfish. The more I understood, the harder it became to recognize the man I had been.

When had I become this person? When had Alessia stopped being the first person I looked for, the first person I thought about, the person whose hurt should have mattered more than anything else? And how the hell had I managed to stop seeing her when she had been right in front of me the entire time?

That night came back to me in painful detail, but this time, it wasn’t the accident that haunted me. It was everything that had happened before it. Alessia had been waiting for me. She had planned a birthday party, probably hoping she could pull me out of the darkness I’d been sinking into, even if only for one night. She had reached for me in the only way she knew how, and I hadn’t even shown up.