I thought the next time I woke up, my world would be a blank slate. Like it had been this morning.
But when I wake up, the right side of my head is pounding, the clock by my bed reads eleven, and the room is pitch black. And most importantly, my memory is still intact. I remember everything that happened today, from the second I woke up.
I don’t understand how this works. Does my memory get erased at midnight? That doesn’t seem like something that could happen outside of a movie.
My head still feels incredibly foggy, but something must have jolted me awake. That memory that had been tugging at me all day today. A memory of Harry speaking to me.
Graham has a desk upstairs. There’s a drawer that’s always locked, and you said you think that’s where he’s keeping whatever he’s giving you.
I sit up straight in bed. The right side of my head is still throbbing dully, and my bladder feels painfully full. I stumble out of bed to the bathroom to at least take care of one of my two discomforts. But even though I’m tired and my brain is still foggy, my thoughts won’t stop racing.
Graham does have an office upstairs. I passed it when I went up to grab something from my bedroom earlier. Is it possible he’s keeping something from me in there?
I don’t know where Graham is. He wasn’t in bed with me. Maybe he went out. Or maybe he’s in his office right now, working.
I’m never going to be able to sleep until I investigate, so I creep out of the bedroom into the hallway, which is also very dark. I can just barely make out a dim light from
downstairs. Graham is downstairs, which means his office is empty.
I keep one hand on the wall, feeling my way down the hallway. I stop when I get to Graham’s office. I try the doorknob and it turns under my hand. I’m about to enter the office when I hear a sound from downstairs. A crash.
And then a woman giggling. What is that?
I forget all about Graham’s office and the stupid desk drawer. Instead, I turn around and head for the stairwell. It’s still dimly lit, so I hang onto the railing. I don’t want to fall and give myself another head injury. Of course, isn’t there that theory that a second head bonk can be curative? Is that a thing?
As I get to the bottom of the stairs, I hear it more clearly.
Giggling. Two people talking softly.
My husband and somebody else. Oh my God. Is it Camila?
Just like when I was out walking Ziggy earlier, I get that strange sensation in my head—it must be another seizure coming on. My knees tremble as everything fades to white, and suddenly, I’m not in my living room anymore.
I’m outside the front door to my house. I’m getting the key into the lock for the front door and turning the knob to push it open. Except it’s not the living room I have right now, with the fancy entertainment system and the leather sofa. It’s my old living room with the ratty futon and the coffee table with one short leg. But that’s not what my eyes focus on.
Right in the middle of the room, Lucy and Harry are together. And to my horror, my best friend’s lips are pressed against my fiancé’s. As the house keys slip out of my fingers, clattering to the ground, Lucy shoves Harry off of her, hard enough that he stumbles. I can’t believe my own eyes. Worse, I wouldn’t have seen it if I had come home just five minutes later.
“Harry!” I cry.
Lucy’s hand is a blur as she reaches out and slaps Harry right across the stubble on his face. “You asshole!” she hisses at him. “How dare you?”
I glare at Harry, who has a bewildered expression on his face. “Lucy, what the hell—”
“He grabbed me!” Lucy backs away from him, her eyes wild, her hand clasped over her mouth. “I’m so sorry, Tess.” She shoots Harry a seething look. “You bastard.”
Harry turns to appeal to me. “Tess, I didn’t… I would never…”
“You would never?” I shout. “I just saw you do it!”
I spin on my heels and march out of the house, even though the keys are still on the floor of the living room. I can’t even think straight. I just have to get out of here, before Harry sees me burst into tears. I barely make it out the front door before a strong hand wraps around my arm.
“Tess!”
I try to shrug him off, but he’s holding on tight. Finally, I whip my head around to face him. “What? What do you have to say for yourself?”
Harry is standing there, a crevice between his eyebrows. “I didn’t do anything. You have to believe me.”
I almost laugh out loud. “You didn’t do anything? Are you joking? I just saw you kiss her!”
“I wasn’t kissing her!” “Harry, I saw it!”
“I…” He glances back at the house, then back at me. “I don’t even like Lucy. You know that! Why would I kiss her?”
I stick out my chin. “I guess you were pretending to hate her to hide your wild attraction for her.”
His mouth falls open. “No. That is not even… come on!
Tess…”
“So explain it to me. Explain to me what I just saw.”
“She grabbed me. I was so shocked, I didn’t even have a second to pull away.”
This time I really do laugh out loud. “Right. I believe that. You’re saying Lucy was overcome with passion for you and tried to kiss you?”
His eyes cloud. He knows how everything must look. Lucy is gorgeous and men are always hitting on her. And while I find Harry incredibly attractive, he’s more of an acquired taste. And so not Lucy’s type.
“I don’t know why she did it,” he finally says. “I’m just telling you what happened.”
Lucy materializes behind Harry, limping slightly in her always too-high heels. Her eyes look swollen and her red hair is disheveled. “That bastard grabbed me, Tess. I’m so sorry you had to see that.”
“I’m sorry too,” I say.
I reach from my left hand, to the engagement ring that I had only taken off to shower since the night he gave it to me. Harry realizes what I’m trying to do, and his eyes fly open. “Tess, no…”
But there’s nothing he can say. I know what I saw, despite his protests. How can I marry him after he kissed my best friend? I’ll never be able to trust him again.
“Tess, please…” I thought I’d be the one crying, but it’s Harry’s eyes that are filling with tears. “Don’t do this. I love you. Let’s talk about it…”
I keep tugging on the ring, the one I thought I’d be wearing for the rest of my life, eventually accompanied by a plain gold band. Now I just want to get it off me. I keep pulling it, trying to work it loose, but it’s stuck. It won’t come free, no matter what I do.
As I pull harder, the living room fades away. It goes white, and when the white is gone, I’m back in my brand new living room again.
But even though all the furnishings are different and it’s many years later, I’m seeing the same thing. In the moonlight pouring through the windows, I can make out my
husband on top of another woman on our sofa, thrusting into her.
“What’s going on here?” I cry.
“Tess!” It’s the woman who calls out my name as she tries to scramble out from underneath Graham’s body. “I… you were asleep!”
It’s Lucy. My best friend. This is the second time I have caught her with my significant other, except this time she wasn’t pushing him away and slapping him across the face. She was having sex with him. Right on my own couch.
Graham doesn’t seem as frazzled as Lucy. He looks like he probably would have finished off if she hadn’t pushed him away from her. He still has his pants on, albeit at his knees, and he takes his time pulling them up and securing them.
“I’m so sorry!” Lucy has leaped off the couch, smoothing out her skirt. She rakes a shaking hand through her red hair, which is tangled and wild around her face. “This… this isn’t what it looks like.”
Graham lets out a barking laugh. For once, I have to agree with him.
“Okay.” Lucy lowers her eyes. “Yes. It is what it looks like. But you have to understand, I didn’t mean for this to happen. And… I’m so sorry. You have no idea how sorry.”
“I’m sure,” I snap. “My best friend is sleeping with my husband. I’m sure you’ve got a great excuse for that one.”
Lucy’s eyes fill with tears. “There’s no excuse. But you have to know how hard this has been on us. On me. And Graham. And then when we were commiserating, it just… happened.”
“It just happened,” I repeat. “And you were powerless to stop it.”
She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “It’s not like that. I was just trying to help by being around for you. We both were. And then…”
She looks over at Graham for support. He rolls his eyes. “Why are you bothering to explain this to her, Lucy? She’ll have forgotten it in the morning anyway.”
She stomps her foot on the ground like a little kid. “That’s not the point! The point is…”
“Yes,” I say through my teeth. “What is the point, Lucy?” “The point is…” She drops her head. “I’m sorry. I love you, Tess. You know that. I never wanted to hurt you. And…”
She looks over at Graham again. “We will never do this again. I swear to you.”
“You kissed Harry too.” I point at the sofa. “I saw you doing it. Right in my own living room.”
Lucy jerks her head up. She didn’t expect me to remember that. “Oh. I… well, yes, but… Tess, he grabbed me. That was completely different.”
Graham snorts again, louder this time. Lucy whips her head around to glare at him. “Will you shut up?”
There’s a smirk on his lips. “What—she’s not going to remember it in the morning, like I said. You may as well ‘fess up that the Boy Scout never really tried to kiss you.”
Her eyes widen. “Shut up, Graham.”
“What are you whining about? You got the raise you wanted, didn’t you? The private corner office?”
I stare at the two of them, my heart pounding. What is he talking about? Is it possible that the scene I had walked in on in my living room all those years ago was all a setup? I shut my eyes for a moment and I can see the bewildered expression on Harry’s face. I never even gave him a chance. I just kept picturing him kissing Lucy, and I couldn’t forgive him.
I have made a horrible mistake.
“Tess.” Lucy flashes me a helpless look. “I don’t know what he’s talking about. I swear to you…”
Graham gets to his feet with a grunt. He ambles over to me and puts his hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Tess. Let’s get you back to bed. You’re probably exhausted.”
He’s right. Even with the adrenaline rush and the anger coursing through my veins, I’m almost too tired to stand. I was already feeling out of it, and the seizure has decimated me. If not for my pounding heart, I would probably collapse into a sleeping pile right on the carpet beneath me. And my bare legs feel cold from some sort of draft in the living room. I shiver.
I allow Graham to lead me away, powerless to stop him. Lucy stays behind, and I wonder if they’re going to finish what they started when Graham comes back downstairs. The crazy part is I don’t even care. Yes, Lucy was sleeping with my husband. But I don’t even know my husband. I don’t love him. It’s like discovering she was sleeping with a stranger.
No, that’s not the part I care about. What I care about is that day I caught her kissing Harry. I can’t stop thinking about the possibility that it might not have been real. If I hadn’t seen him kiss her, I would be married to him right now. Instead of Graham.
Unlike when Graham carried me up the stairs earlier, I’m able to make it up on my own two feet this time. But he keeps his arm on me, ready to catch me if I fall. I suppose that’s worth something.
“Listen, Tess.” Graham watches me as I climb into bed. “I’m sorry you had to see that. But you can understand, can’t you?”
I blink at him through the darkness. “I can?”
He shrugs. “You don’t even know me. It’s not like we have any sort of a real relationship anymore.”
“What was Lucy talking about downstairs?” I ask him, although it’s hard to form words. My tongue feels like a big lump in my mouth. “About when Harry kissed her.”
“Oh. Right.” I can see him grinning in the darkness, his teeth glowing in the dim moonlight. “Well, it’s pretty simple. I had a thing for you, so I asked Lucy if she could help me
out. She never liked Harry much anyway, so it didn’t take much to persuade her.”
My head is spinning. Now that I’ve retrieved that memory of walking in on Harry and Lucy, the whole argument I had with Harry after comes rushing back to me. The way he pleaded with me. Swore up and down that Lucy had been the one who grabbed him. I called him a liar. Managed to wrench the ring from my finger and threw it at him. Slammed the front door in his face even as he was blinking back tears.
“You bastard,” I manage.
“I’m the bastard?” His eyes fly open wide behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “That’s rich. I can’t believe you would say that to me after you…” He grits his teeth then shakes his head. “Forget it. There’s no point in talking about this.”
My eyelids are so heavy, I can barely keep them open. But I can’t let this go. “What? What horrible thing did I do to you? Because I don’t remember it.”
“What horrible thing did you do to me?” He licks his lips. “Do you have an hour or two? No, you don’t. You’ll probably be asleep in the next sixty seconds. So I’ll skip to the best part.” He lowers his voice. “Before this happened to you, you were going to leave me. You hired a lawyer and everything. You said you couldn’t stand the sight of me. You couldn’t wait to get me out of your life and cut me out of your company. That’s what I get for signing a goddamn prenup.”
My mouth drops open. “What?”
“That’s right.” He smirks at me. “You had this whole plan about leaving me high and dry. And now you’re stuck with me. For the rest of your life. And I get to be the one in control for a change. I get to decide what you eat, what clothing you get to wear, whether you get to have a phone or not. I could even get rid of that dog of yours and you would never even know it.” He winks at me. “Hey, maybe I will… if you don’t learn to behave yourself…”
I want to reach out and scratch his eyes out. But the fatigue I’m feeling is almost overwhelming, especially combined with the darkness of the room. When I lift my arm, it’s like I’m moving through molasses. I don’t know why I’m so tired. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this tired in my life. Graham is standing over me, watching me struggle to keep my eyes open.
And then it occurs to me. Maybe the whole reason I’m tired is that Graham has already given me a dose of whatever he’s been keeping in his desk drawer. After all, he’s the one who poured me that glass of water at dinner. It would’ve been so easy for him.
I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to send myself a message with a warning. I’ve got to…
