Pictures of You

Chapter 72

72

Evie

Drew is pacing the room, which is more than I can manage. I can’t actually stand right now.

“Is this … your mum’s …” I can’t say it. Can’t even think it.

“Yes,” he confirms.

Neither of us seems able to say the words suicide note aloud. But there’s that sentence, with the butchered order of adjectives. The inviolable rule, violated not once but twice, by not one but two intelligent, articulate adults …

“I found it in her Sent folder the night she died,” he says, rereading the note on his screen. I suspect he’s read it a million times since. “I hadn’t read my emails in time.” Refreshed pain sears across his features. He looks back at me, broken. “Evie, I know you can’t remember your time at uni, but you were close to getting a PhD. If you had to dig deep and just take a wild guess?”

I know what he’s asking. I just don’t want to give him my answer. Perhaps he held on to these words from his mum for years. And without me raising this, he wouldn’t be questioning their authorship now. Here he is, trying to get me through my crisis, and I’m creating one in return.

“Please, Evie—what do you think?”

I can’t avoid it. “I’d guess the same person made the wedding speech and wrote the suicide note,” I confirm without fanfare. “I’d guess, at the very least, your mum had help writing that note …”

“Help, or …”

Neither of us can say the word murder . Murder is for Agatha Christie. It’s for CSI Miami . It’s for How to Host a Murder parties. It’s a group of crows. Murder is not something that happens in our own family .

And isn’t that what Drew and I have become? Family? Sort of … even if he’s estranged and we’re not related, and he shares only half his blood with my dead husband.

I’m beginning to wonder if I even want my memory back. The trailer I’m being drip-fed about the life I’ve forgotten isn’t inspiring me with much confidence or desire to return to it. Maybe I’ll be one of the lucky ones whose memories never return at all. I could just draw a line in the sand and start from here. I could see out the rest of life as an incomplete jigsaw puzzle with the scary pieces lost. Like one of those cracked Japanese vases with the broken bits filled with gold.

“I found a note in my podcast studio at the house with adjective order written on it,” I confess. The idea that I was already onto this before the accident suddenly seems even worse than the unexplained abandonment of my friends and family.

This news hits Drew hard. “Evie, you knew ?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember!”

He shakes his head.

“Maybe I was doing the same thing for you as you’ve been doing for me. Protecting you from the truth.”

I’m worried that the dissociative amnesia will get him too. That everything I’ve remembered and that he’s confronting will stretch him too far, like my life stretched me. Until his mind just ruptures.

We can’t have that—one of us needs to stay together here. And that person needs to be him. No matter how much he’d like to share my luxury of an obliterated past.