The afternoon sun in the doctor's private office was too cheerful, too bright for the news it delivered.
"Retrograde amnesia is not uncommon with significant trauma, Mrs. Hart," Dr. Lin explained, her voice a practiced blend of clinical detachment and sympathy. She pointed to a simplified diagram of the brain on her tablet, but the lines blurred before my eyes. "The impact disrupted the neural pathways responsible for consolidating and retrieving memories from a specific period. In your case, the last three years."
*Three years.*
The words were a guillotine, cleanly severing me from a third of my adult life. They landed with a dull, final thud in the pit of my stomach.
"Three years," I echoed, the taste of the phrase metallic and strange. "So everything from... my twenty-second birthday onward?"
Dr. Lin nodded. "Approximately. You retain your core identity, your childhood memories, your education, your skills. But the personal experiences, the episodic memories from that time frame... they are currently inaccessible."
I tried to grasp the shape of that emptiness. What fills three years? A career? A home? A... marriage?
"My... husband," I said, testing the word. It still felt like trying on a coat several sizes too large. "He says we've been married for most of that time."
"He's been your primary point of contact and care since the accident," Dr. Lin confirmed, her tone carefully neutral. "The continuity he provides can be a stabilizing force. Familiar environments, routines, people—they can sometimes act as keys, triggering associative memories."
But Damian didn't feel like a key. He felt like a lock. A very beautiful, very complicated lock on a door I couldn't even find.
"Will they come back?" The question was a desperate plea. "The memories?"
Dr. Lin met my gaze, her kind eyes not flinching from the fear in mine. "It's impossible to say with certainty. Sometimes, memories return in fragments—flashes of sound, image, emotion. Sometimes, they return in a flood. Sometimes..." She paused, choosing her words. "Sometimes, the brain protects itself by leaving certain chapters closed. The treatment now is patience. Gentle stimulation. Avoid stress. Forcing recall can cause more harm than good."
*Patience. Gentle stimulation. Avoid stress.* A prescription for passivity. For accepting the void.
Damian, who had been sitting silently in a chair by the window, spoke up. His voice was calm, a steady anchor in the dizzying conversation. "We'll follow your recommendations, Doctor. Whatever Aria needs."
*We.* The word lumped me together with him, a unit I didn't remember forming.
The car ride back to the mansion was silent. I stared out at the city, a place I supposedly knew but that now looked like a model built by strangers. Three years of navigating these streets, of having favorite cafes and shortcuts, were gone. I was a tourist in my own life.
Once inside the oppressive grandeur of the foyer, the reality of the diagnosis pressed down on me with physical weight. I leaned against the cold marble of a console table, my legs unsteady.
"It's a lot to process," Damian said. He didn't touch me, but he stood close, a solid presence in my peripheral vision.
"A lot?" A hysterical laugh bubbled in my throat, but it came out as a choked sound. "It's everything, Damian. It's my *life*. Did we meet at a party? Did you propose on a beach? What was my job? What made me laugh? What did I want for breakfast on Tuesdays?" The questions spilled out, frantic and unanswerable. "I don't know if I loved gardening or hated it. I don't know if I was a good wife. I don't know *you*."
Each admission was a tiny fracture in the dam of my composure.
"You were an artist," he said quietly, his first voluntary offering of my past. "A talented one. You painted. Mostly abstracts. You said they were how you processed the world when words failed."
An artist. I looked at my hands, currently trembling and empty. They didn't feel like an artist's hands. No telltale stains, no calluses from a brush.
"You had a studio. On the north side of the house. It gets the best light."
A studio. A place of my own. A spark of something—longing? curiosity?—ignited briefly before being smothered by the overwhelming unknown. "Why didn't you show me?"
"It's been closed since..." He hesitated. "Since before the accident. I thought it might be overwhelming." He finally turned to fully face me. "Do you want to see it?"
Did I? To confront a physical space dedicated to a passion I couldn't recall? It felt like visiting my own grave.
"Not yet," I whispered, the cowardice of the answer shaming me.
He simply nodded. "Whenever you're ready."
We moved to the library, a room that was becoming my reluctant refuge. The silence stretched, filled with the ghosts of three years of conversations we must have had, fights we must have had, quiet moments we must have shared.
"I feel like an imposter," I confessed to the rows of books. "Living in this house, wearing these clothes, being called your wife. It's a role I'm reading off a script I've never seen."
"You are not an imposter." His voice was firmer now, edged with something that sounded like frustration, or maybe pain. "This is your home. These are your things. I am your husband. The legal documents, the photographs, the witnesses to our life—they all attest to that. Your mind may not confirm it, but every other piece of evidence does."
"It's not evidence I need!" I cried, spinning to face him. "I need the *feeling*. The memory of choosing you! Of saying 'yes'! Of wearing a ring for the first time!" I looked down at the platinum band on my left hand, a perfect, cold circle. "This feels like a handcuff."
The moment the word left my mouth, I saw him flinch as if struck. The controlled mask shattered, revealing a glimpse of such raw, unguarded hurt that I instinctively took a step back.
For a long, terrible moment, he just looked at me, that wound laid bare in his eyes. Then, with a visible, almost physical effort, he rebuilt the walls. His expression smoothed into its usual impassive state, but his eyes remained dark, haunted.
"Then take it off," he said, his voice dangerously quiet. "If it feels like a handcuff, remove it."
The challenge hung in the air. My fingers went to the ring, circling the cool metal. It was a simple, elegant design. Had I chosen it? The act of removing it felt monumental, a denial of the three blank years, a rejection of him and this entire constructed life. But leaving it on felt like a surrender to a fiction.
I couldn't do it. My hand fell away.
He let out a slow breath, one I hadn't realized he was holding. "The mind forgets, Aria," he said, turning to look out the window, his back to me. "But the heart has a deeper memory. You may not remember loving me. But somewhere, in a place the accident couldn't reach, you do. And I will wait for that part of you to find its way back to the surface."
He left then, giving me the solitude I both craved and dreaded.
I sank into the armchair, the doctor's words and Damian's pain swirling in a maelstrom inside me. Three years. A blank canvas.
But as I sat in the deepening twilight, a new and more terrifying thought emerged.
What if I didn't want to remember?
What if the woman who cried in the mirror, who stopped writing in her journal, who felt trapped, had been painting a picture with those three years that I was better off not seeing?
The blankness was a prison, but it was also a strange, terrible mercy. And the man who was waiting so patiently for me to remember might be the very reason I had needed to forget.