“Remi!” I roared, hurrying through the house.
Her purse was gone, and as I jogged out onto the driveway, I discovered that her car was too.
“Fuck!” I boomed, my voice echoing off the brick of my house.
This was not the way she was supposed to find out. There was supposed to be a whole conversation where I gently and rationally explained the clusterfuck that was our lives. I was going to hold her while she cried for a past she didn’t remember and be there for her as she worked through the emotions of realizing she never would. I’d even considered a scenario where she was angry and hurt, but no matter which way it happened, she was never supposed to be alone, her mind no doubt running wild with questions and assumptions.
And fuck me. Fucking fuck me. Not all of her assumptions would be wrong.
But she couldn’t understand.
She didn’t know how bad it had gotten.
She couldn’t possibly fathom the depths of the darkness she’d fought through for the eight months leading up to the crash.
I had no idea how long she’d been gone, but I raced back into the house and grabbed my phone, immediately calling Aaron.
“Hello?” he answered.
“Have you seen Remi?” I snapped, stabbing my feet into a pair of running shoes.
“Jesus, did you lose her again?” There was humor in his voice. It wouldn’t last long.
“She knows,” I stated. It didn’t need an explanation or elaboration.
The line went silent.
His panic permeated the line. “What?” he shouted. “How?”
I snagged my keys off the hook and full-out sprinted to my truck. “She found some pictures.” I had no fucking idea how, although that wasn’t my concern at the moment.
“Why the hell did you have pictures in the house?”
I hit the ignition and gritted my teeth. “Because, while you spent six months sleeping in the bedroom beside her, those pictures were all that I fucking had. Now, just tell me if you’ve seen her this morning or not.”
He let out a low groan. “She hasn’t been here.”
“Are you at the house?”
“Yeah.”
Pinning the phone against my shoulder, I threw my truck into gear. “Go ask Mark.”
There was a muffled conversation followed by a deep rumbled growl, followed quickly by Mark’s voice on the other end. “What the fuck did you do?”
“I don’t have time for your bullshit right now. We can have a backyard brawl once we find her. God only knows what the hell’s going through her mind right now.”
He seemed no less pissed, but thankfully he dropped the accusations. “Did you call her?”
“She left her phone at my place.”
“Son of a bitch. Okay… Maybe…try her office. What kind of pictures did she see? We need to get our stories straight.”
“Stories?” I barked, backing out of my driveway. “She saw a video of us at her birthday party. What the hell kind of story do you think you’re going to come up with to explain that? No fucking way I’m stacking another layer of lies on top of this Goddamn mountain. It’s gone on long enough.”
“If you tell her the truth, you risk—”
I couldn’t take it anymore. I knew the risks. I’d lived on the frontlines of hell and was half a fucking man because of it. I didn’t have the time or energy to listen to him play the same broken record about what could possibly happen if she remembered the past.
“Shut the fuck up!” I roared, slamming my hand down on the steering wheel. “I have always known the risks. And right now, until I can find her and explain, the only risk I’m thinking about is losing her. No more lies. I’m telling her everything. And then I’m going to deal with the fallout no matter what it looks like.”
I hit the end button. She wasn’t at their house, and that was honestly the only reason I’d called. With that knowledge, I no longer needed a damn thing from Mark or Aaron.
Flying down the road, I made my next call to her dad.
“Yello,” he answered jovially.
Fuck. From that cheery greeting alone, I knew he hadn’t seen her.
“Remi knows. She was at my house, found an old thumb drive with pictures, and took off. I’m headed to her office now. Do me a favor. Call me if you see her?”
“Shit, son.”
“Full disclosure: This ends today. I’m telling her the truth. I’d rather have Sally back than lose Remi again.”
“I…” He sighed. “It’s a slippery slope, Bowen. One we’ve all been chasing her down for a long time. I trust you to make the right call, but if I know my girl, she’s going to be a live wire over this.”
“As she should be.”
He wasn’t blaming me. He was just as culpable for this façade as I was. But desperate men make desperate decisions. The question was how badly would they grow to regret them.
“I’ll let you know if I find her,” I told him.
“Same, son. I’ll go check The Wave in case she was in need of something that felt like home.”
Fuck. Once upon a time, I’d been her home. Not because we’d shared a house, but rather because we’d shared a love that neither time nor distance could ever challenge.
Fate though? That cruel bitch was ready to wreck it all over again.
“Thanks, Jack,” I mumbled before hitting the end button and dropping my phone into my lap. An all-too-familiar hopelessness washed over me.
Remi
After my mom left when I was in high school, my dad had been a mess. Present, accounted for, but still filled with more grief than my adolescent mind could process. Life just hadn’t felt whole without her. I distinctly remembered lying in bed one night, staring up at the ceiling, wondering if the chill of loneliness would ever leave my bones.
It had been many years since I’d felt that way. But as I sat in my rolling chair in my office, with nowhere to go, no one to talk to, and no one left in my life that I trusted to give me an honest-to-God explanation, the chill in my bones returned. Only this time, it felt more like I was dying of hypothermia.
However, as I frantically tried to make sense of even the tiniest detail of the last few months, a fiery rage kept me ablaze.
I racked my brain for clues I’d somehow missed. Things I’d written off as coincidences at the time but now seemed more like flashing red lights.
Like how he’d never asked me if I was on birth control, which I had been since I was a teen because my cycle was so bad. Something a fiancé would have known for sure.
Holy fuck. We’d been engaged.
Based on some basic math from my last memories to the plane crash, it wasn’t possible we’d been together for a whole year, yet I’d accepted his proposal? I must have loved him something fierce for him to be able to get me to agree. That, or he was a fucking master of manipulation. My heart told me the former, but my brain was pretty damn set on the latter.
I folded my arms on my desk and rested my head on top of them.
He knew my favorite wine. At our first run-in at McMurphy’s, he hadn’t sent me the house chardonnay or a pinot grigio. He’d sent me a glass of New Zealand Sav Blanc. My favorite. A coarse laugh escaped my throat. I’d just thought he had good taste.