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‘What consequences?’ she cried in frustration, dragging him to a halt by the sleeve of his shirt. ‘I’ve admitted I remember the beginning of our affair. How can I be expected to face what I still can’t remember? If it’s so important, why don’t you tell me?’
‘Because just telling you about your past life won’t make it any more real to you if you can’t attach any feelings to the memories. Although you thought you’d forgotten I existed, you still had the emotional memory of me, which started you on the road to remembering.’
This time, it was Nina’s turn to walk away. ‘You’re implying I have some sort of control over this thing.’
He caught up with her easily on the narrow track. ‘I’m only pointing out that you seem more afraid of remembering than you do of forgetting,’ he said quietly. ‘Maybe that fall on the ferry completed a process that had already begun, and hitting your head provided your mind with a perfectly logical opportunity for you to dissociate yourself from the problem period in your life.’
‘My problem period being my entire relationship with you!’ she said bitterly. ‘In other words, you’re saying you don’t believe I have amnesia at all.’
‘Oh, I have no doubt that you do—just not the brain-injury kind. And I think you subconsciously know that, which is why you’ve been avoiding doctors.’
‘I avoid doctors because I had enough of medical experts while Gran was dying! It was a truly horrible time. If I was looking for a period of my life I wanted to dissociate from, surely it would have been that one!’
They walked the rest of the road in uneasy silence, but when they got back to the house, Ryan went straight into his room and came back carrying a plastic folder of photographs.
‘You missed them when you frisked my bag—they were in the side compartment,’ he said, placing them on the bookshelf. ‘I’ll leave them here for when you’re ready to look at them.’
His caution was like a red rag to a bull. ‘I’m ready now!’ declared Nina, determined to prove that she wasn’t entirely a cringing coward. ‘Are you going to tell me what they are?’ she asked as she sat at the table and took them out of the folder.
‘Why don’t you just look at them and ask me questions?’ He straddled a chair and folded his arms along the curved back.
There were twenty in all—glossy, sunny photographs that showed no hints of any lurking unhappiness—mostly of Ryan and Nina together, but there were a few pictures of a big, white, double-storeyed, Mediterranean-style house, a large swimming pool surrounded by clusters of lush palms and of people she didn’t know, including one of a little boy not yet out of nappies, dressed in cute denim overalls and sitting astride a push-along wooden horse, his curly black hair standing up all over his head, his blue eyes twinkling with laughter at the camera. Nina barely glanced at that one, her eyes blanking with disinterest as she pushed it quickly aside under the others.
Ryan watched her action with eyes that were bleak with pain. Deliberately, he fished out the photo she had just discarded and fingered it as he asked, ‘Any questions?’
Nina’s heart jerked with dread, and she reshuffled the photos until the top one displayed the picture of the Mediterranean house. ‘I get a strong sense of deja vu about the places and those pictures of you and I—I remember doing some of those things with you—’
‘But you don’t remember any of the other people?’
He was still fingering the photograph, so Nina didn’t look at him. She didn’t want to start talking about the people and certainly wasn’t interested in other people’s babies….
She shook her head. ‘Most of them are just faces, except for Katy. I suppose she’s studying in America now.’
For a brief instant, his face lit up with pride. ‘She’s getting top marks and has already had several good job offers in the States.’
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Ryan slip the picture he was holding into the breast pocket of his white shirt. Through the thin linen she could see only the vague, shadowy outline of an image.
