Pictures of You

Chapter 2

2

Half an hour later, my medical team is still parading in and out of my room as I sift through a stylish Gucci tote for my phone. I fling everything onto the bed, producing a stash of luxury makeup, keys to a Jeep, and a small white flip-top case containing a useless set of headphones without cords.

There’s a phone, but it can’t be mine. It’s so big. And there’s no ON button! I’m swiping my finger all over the giant screen when it suddenly springs to life and I’m confronted with thirty-eight missed call notifications and a barrage of messages.

“What just happened?” I ask Liz, who’s checking my blood pressure. Again.

“It’s face ID.”

Like in science fiction?

“It recognizes your face,” she says. “You would have set it up when you first got the phone.”

So my phone knows me better than I know myself? I’m madly scrolling through my contacts list now, desperate to call Mum to tell her the bad news: I’m old.

And the good news: I’m awake!

And the other bad news: Her son-in-law is dead.

Son-in-law!

My finger hovers over his name in my contacts list. Oliver. Evidence that what they are telling me might be true. If it is, I wonder how many thousands of times I might have dialed this very number and discussed something marital, like what was for dinner or whether he’d remembered to pay the gas bill. Perhaps the screen would light up with his name and my heart would skip a beat like it does for women in novels, because we were the type of couple who direct-debited all our bills and left phone calls purely for romantic exchanges like “Pack a bag, Evie, I’m sweeping you off for the weekend!”

The temptation is too great. I touch the name and hold the phone to my ear. Perhaps it will shift something about this huge cosmic mistake the universe appears to have made and bring him back?

Voicemail clicks in. “You’ve reached Oliver Roche. Leave a message.”

It’s a deep, no-nonsense, manly voice and I’m horrified to think I was married to it. To him . I’m also a tiny bit disappointed that I chose a partner with such an unimaginative recording. My own is an effervescent triumph! I rehearsed it at least seventeen times until it sounded spontaneous. That gives me the idea to listen to my own recording now and check what theatrical feat I pulled off more than a decade later.

“You’ve reached Evelyn Roche. Leave a message.”

Evelyn? I never call myself that. And Roche? Not Hudson?

Not to mention the wording is oddly identical to Oliver’s bland script. I play it again. “You’ve reached Evelyn Roche …” On its third play, I’m wishing I could reach Evelyn Roche and ask her why her voice is so flat and her message so formal. I thought I’d sound more excited by life at twenty-nine.

I go back to my contacts and scroll to M for Mum. Just seeing her name on the screen triggers an avalanche of relief and comfort. I tap the number, fast. Maybe she’s already on her way to Sydney from Newcastle. Surely they called my parents as next of kin since my so-called husband is … well, I can’t even bring myself to say it.

“Evelyn,” says an unfamiliar voice as the call connects.

“Hello?”

“You’re awake,” the woman states.

“Sorry, who is this?” I pull the phone away from my ear quickly to check that I really dialed Mum’s number.

“It’s Gwendolyn. We’re on our way.”

The line goes dead and I’m left staring at the screen, which informs me that the conversation took exactly eight seconds. More than adequate time to tumble into an abyss. Who was that?

“Who is Gwendolyn?” I ask Liz, hoping she has an intimate knowledge of my family tree, but she’s triple-checking my pain relief dosage with the psych. “She’s on her way in,” I explain, my voice shaking when they look up. “With someone else.”

Maybe it’s the medication they’ve got me on, but I’m woozy, and that’s before I scroll to find that Dad doesn’t appear in the list at all! Instead, the only person at that end of the alphabet other than Cleaner and Car Service Place is someone called Chloe, whom I’ve never heard of.

Oh, here’s Bree! Thank God . I touch her name and hit the speaker button. “Your call could not be connected. Please check the number and try again.”

Liz, clearly well practiced, notices me signaling for the sick bag in a cardboard dispenser on the wall beside her and passes it to me just in time, making the psychiatrist, still buried in his notebook, look up and flinch.

Everything is wrong here.

Every single thing.

No father. An imposter mother. No best friend. Boring voicemail. Even the giant phone is all wrong, as if I’ve woken up in some horrible, unrecognizable Freaky Friday reality that I can’t bear!

My shaking finger taps something called Uber by accident and the phone asks, Where to?

Liz, who has fetched a warm facecloth, sees the open app, smiles sympathetically, and says, “No, Evie, you can’t escape just yet.”

“Escape?”

“In an Uber. It’s like a private taxi service. You can order cars to pick you up from anywhere and take you wherever you want.”

From where I’m lying, this Uber sounds magical . I wipe my face and try not to cry about the alarming fact that I seem to have been abandoned in a big, bustling, unfamiliar world where strangers aren’t even dangerous anymore and we simply get into cars with them.

“Would they take me to Newcastle?” I ask, my voice small. “The Uber people?”

She smiles. “For a huge fee! Look, I know it’s scary. But the chances are your memory will return.”

“But what then?” If I’m truly almost thirty and my husband just died, I’ll plunge straight from this hellish time warp into an equally horrific black hole of grief.

“Go easy on yourself. You’ve had a huge shock,” Liz reminds me. “You were in a traumatic car accident. You’ve had a deep loss.”

But the shock is not that Oliver died, it’s that he existed. And the loss isn’t about him—it’s about everything else.

“We’ll do some more tests,” the psychiatrist announces. “Sometimes, during times of extreme trauma, the brain throws you back to a time in your life when you felt safe.”

Yes. This part I understand. I do feel safe at sixteen. I have parents who adore me. A best friend who sticks to my side like glue. I have goals and plans and meticulously documented dreams, none of which include waking up thirteen years later with dark hair, posh glasses, and a huge phone, totally isolated from everything in the entire world that ever mattered to me.

“If it’s dissociative amnesia,” he adds, “the memory loss is almost always temporary. It may just take some time and therapy.”

“Amnesia?”

“It can help to surround yourself in familiarity,” Liz suggests. “Be around the people who care about you and something might flash back.”

What people, though? My husband is dead. The people who loved me aren’t even in my phone. Gwendolyn sounded like a cross between Miss Trunchbull and Lady Macbeth.

Then I remember the thirty-eight missed calls. Are they from my friends?

I click on my recent call history. But it’s all Oliver Mobile. Oliver Messenger Video. Oliver Messenger Audio.

This is useless. I open my camera roll. At first glance, I seem to have taken about twenty shots of the same autumn leaf. What’s wrong with me?

I scroll back further, hoping for signs of human life.

There are some pictures of someone’s kid. A little girl with blond pigtails. Out-of-focus, crooked selfies she’s taken. Photos of her laughing and smiling and pulling faces and poking her tongue out. Wonky pictures she’s taken of me, all out of proportion and elongated due to the angles.

“Does she look familiar?” Liz asks.

No.

And nor do I.

I shake my head, zooming in on my face. I’m smiling into the lens at this kid, like I love her. Surely she isn’t mine ?

Oh my God, even worse than not having a mum is the impossible idea that I could be one! At the very thought, the bottom seems to drop out of my bed. I grab the guardrails, walls spinning, the concept of having a child giving me vertigo. Maybe she’s Bree’s. Or the kid of some random friend I’ve forgotten? Perhaps I’m her nanny—that has to be it. This body hasn’t gone through childbirth , has it?

I kick the sheet off my legs dramatically. Is this a hot flash? No! I’m not that old.

I keep scrolling through more photos, desperate for answers. My heart races as my thumb stops, settling on a picture of a man.

Could this be him? Oliver, the husband? Crazy hot husband, if I do say so myself. I pinch the screen and zoom. It must be him. What other man would be gazing into my lens as though he adored me?

My focus ambles over his precision-styled blond hair and across the strong contours of his cheekbones. I admire the sparkle in his blue eyes. A beautiful blue. Startling eyes, really. The kind of intense expression and movie-star jaw that younger me would have absolutely fallen for. It’s that boy band perfection I secretly idolized.

Nicely done, Evie. I mean, if you had to sell out and marry someone.

And now I imagine for the first time how all of this might have unfolded. If a man like this singled out someone like me, I can see how I might have been swayed. Last I knew, there were precisely zero boys on the scene. Breanna told me it was because I was fixated on the 1800s and on academics, and that I became an anxious wreck the second a boy glanced in my direction. And she was right. My No Romance rule was because I was hugely ambitious. I knew exactly how much love my romantic heart was capable of, and the truth was I was scared. Worried I’d meet a boy so magnetic, so utterly charming and charismatic and fascinating and glorious, that he would make a total mess of me. Of my academic plans. Of my big dreams. Losing myself was always my biggest fear. A fear that has suddenly been realized in the very worst of ways, because here I am, having found that kind of love and lost it, leaving me all at sea in a bewildering reality that makes no sense.

“Breathe, Evie,” Liz says soothingly, while the heart monitor charges off.

“I think this is him.” I show her the screen. “Oliver.”

The victim.

She takes my phone, then she glances back at me, probably thinking what I’m thinking. In what universe did you pull off a match this triumphant?

“I’m so sorry, Evie,” she says, mouth grim, eyes welling.

Because it was a triumphant match. Past tense.

Knowing the girl I was, there’s no explanation for the path I’ve taken other than this romance must have been it . An all-consuming, period-drama-rivaling, personal-rule-breaking love story that teenage me had secretly been pining for all along.

And now I’ve gone and forgotten every blissful second of it.