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‘I know.’ He reached for her hand again and she didn’t stop him. Didn’t want to. She felt anchored, with her hand in his. As if she could start to put the pieces of herself back together again. As if she could finally start to understand herself.
‘Can you tell me any more about the baby?’ Guy asked, his voice quiet.
Meena took a deep breath. ‘I’m so sorry, Guy, but there isn’t much to tell. I was only a few weeks pregnant. Barely
far enough along to take a test. That’s all the doctors were able to tell me when I woke up.’
‘So we won’t know whether it would have been a boy or a girl.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry.’
He squeezed her hand again, and Meena felt it in her chest. ‘You don’t have to keep apologising,’ Guy said. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘Well, it certainly wasn’t anyone else’s,’ Meena said, voicing a thought she’d always shied away from. ‘Whose fault was it, if not mine?’
‘How about the person that caused the accident?’ Guy asked. ‘You know, you’ve never told me what happened.’
Because there wasn’t much to tell, and she’d had it all second-hand anyway. She didn’t remember a moment of it. ‘It’s not much of a story. I was crossing a road and apparently a motorbike came too fast around a corner, lost control and knocked me over. Head injury. Internal injuries. I think you can imagine the rest.’
‘How long were you in the clinic?’
‘In total? A couple of years.’
She laughed at the surprise on his face; what else could she do? ‘Did you think I just got up and walked out? Guy, I had to learn to walk. I had to learn to talk. I was lucky that I had health insurance. If it wasn’t for all the support at the clinic, I don’t know that I would have ever been able to live independently. I’ve only been diving again for a year or so. Did you know they make you wait five years after a serious head injury? I’m lucky that I haven’t suffered from fits since it happened. If I had, I wouldn’t have been allowed back in the water at all. I was worried, every day of those five years, that I would never be able to get properly back in the water again.’
‘So by the time you got out of the clinic...’ Guy started, finally piecing together the timeline of their relationship.
‘Everything from that summer was gone. My phone was destroyed. I couldn’t access any of my online accounts for months because I barely knew who I was. By the time I was even thinking about it, the tech companies made it impossible and I didn’t have the energy to fight them. I had to let it all go, start fresh, concentrate on my recovery and rehab.’
‘You let me go,’ he said sadly.
But it wasn’t as simple as that. She hadn’t let go, not really. She hadn’t even known what she was clinging to, but she’d never stopped thinking about who the man she had given herself to might have been. ‘I didn’t know who you were. All I knew was that I had been pregnant. I found a couple of notes, scribbled on the back of a dive plan, that made me think that maybe I’d had a boyfriend. They were the only clues that I had. It wasn’t enough to go on.’
‘I wish I’d been here.’
She couldn’t let herself think about that. About all the ways that her life might have been different if his flight had been a week later, or if she’d crossed the road in a different spot. They could have a family now—could be a family now. It was too strange even to consider.
It still didn’t feel like her, the woman who had been hit by the motorcycle. In a way, Meena was glad that she couldn’t remember that time. Because she didn’t have to think about how much she had changed. What had motivated that change. She could try to get on with her life as she had been before her memories had gone.
Until Guy had turned up and reminded her that that wasn’t possible. She couldn’t pretend that she hadn’t changed that summer. Even without her memories, she had known that something was different. And that was why she’d spent the last seven years trying to make sense out of the different pieces of her life. And why she had consistently failed. Because she needed to know it all to make sense of it.
She realised with a jolt that her hand was still resting in Guy’s, and with another jolt that she had no intention of moving it. Because this was the missing piece. She couldn’t figure out who she had been that summer unless she followed through on these feelings that she had for Guy. Unless she acted now, as she had acted then, to see if that made her understand who she had been. She pulled his hand a little closer to her and then looked up, meeting his eye.
He had sat down close to her on the sand. He had taken her hand. But she was the one who was going to move closer. To tip her face up to his and make absolutely clear what she wanted from him.
‘Meena...’ he started to say, but she laid a hand on his arm and he stopped, his gaze moving from her face down to her hand and then back to her eyes. ‘This is not a good idea,’ he said eventually.
‘Does that mean that you don’t want to do it?’ she asked, without a hint of guile, because really she just wanted to know that they were on the same page, that she hadn’t misread the situation and was about to make a complete fool of herself.
‘Of course I want to,’ he said, and she thought that it might be the simplest, most uncomplicated thing that he had said to her since he had shown up in St Antoine. But the consequences of his confession were anything but simple. ‘That doesn’t mean that I think we should. I’m going to be leaving soon,’ he reminded her, as if the thought didn’t already haunt her. ‘Again.’
‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I’m not looking to the future. But...but my past is so complicated. And so much of it is missing, and I think that... I think that we could fill in some of those gaps, if you wanted...’
He shook his head, spoke softly, one hand coming up to play with the curls that fell forward towards him. ‘We can’t recreate the past, Meena,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve proved that already. It’s not going to bring your memories back.’
‘I know that,’ she said quietly, turning her face towards his hand, where it played gently with her hair. ‘I’m coming to terms with that. And I don’t want to just re-enact the past either. But I want to understand who I was then. And this is a way to do that.’
‘So I’m just an experiment to you. Is that your plan? It’s hardly fair to ask that of me, Meena. What do I get out of it?’
