Page 92 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

I staggered back half a step, staring at her. My mind rejected the words before I could even process them.

“No.” I shook my head, refusing to accept it. “You’re lying.” I stepped toward her again, almost challenging her to say it once more. “Tell me the truth. Tell me what actually happened. Don’t stand there and tell me she came to you, because I know Alessia. She would never—” I broke off, my breath catching. “She wouldn’t do that.”

She scoffed and sank deeper into the couch, looking almost insulted that I could question her. “I’m not lying. You can ask her yourself. She’s the one who offered to help me.” One shoulder lifted in a careless shrug. “I just accepted what she put in front of me.”

My mind recoiled from the idea. It made no sense.

Why would she do that? She never liked my mother.

Then a terrible, dawning clarity clicked into place.

“You’re hiding something.” I kept my eyes locked on hers, refusing to let her evade the question. “There’s more to this. Alessia had a reason for making that offer. She wouldn’t have done it without one. What was it, Ma? What did she want in return?”

Alessia had done that… for me?

The thought left me staring into nothing, unable to comprehend the enormity of it. I scrambled through my memories, searching through the past year, trying to count every time my mother had intruded into my life.

There had been nothing.

No calls.

No surprise visits.

No demands.

No fresh wounds dragged back to the surface.

After that first time Alessia had helped her, my mother had simply stopped.

And I had been so relieved that I had never asked why.

I had been grateful for the silence. Grateful for the absence. Grateful that I could finally move through my days without bracing myself for the next intrusion, without having to open old wounds I had spent years trying to bury.

I had taken that peace and never once questioned who had paid for it.

Alessia had seen what my mother did to me. She had watched the way I changed whenever her name appeared on my phone, the way old memories could hollow me out in seconds. She had understood the toll long before I ever found the words to explain it.

And instead of watching me suffer, my wife had stepped in.

She had put herself between us.

She had taken every call, every demand, every confrontation I had spent my life dreading, and carried it away from me without asking for recognition. Without telling me what she had done. Without once making me feel indebted to her.

She had simply loved me enough to do it.

My throat tightened.

That was never her burden to bear. It was mine.

I stared at my mother, barely able to get the words out. “You should have said no. You never should have accepted.”

Her eyes flashed with indignation. “Your wife proposed the arrangement, and you’re blaming me?”

“Yes.” I stepped closer, anger burning through every inch of me. “Because her intention was to protect me. You knew that. You saw her compassion and you exploited it. You took advantage of the love she had for me, knowing she would sacrifice herself rather than let me suffer.”

Her eyes hardened into chips of ice. Her expression turned so frigid that for a heart-stopping second, I was a child again, trapped and helpless, bracing for the storm. Would she pull me close or push me away? Tell me I was her world or that my face disgusted her?

I blinked, the past receding as quickly as it had surfaced, and I was back in the present.