Chapter 28
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— Lilac —
Last night had been good. That was the thought I kept coming back to as I stood at the counter with my coffee, the house quiet around me. Last night had been good.
I’d cooked. Nothing elaborate, just the chicken and rice dish I’d been making for years, the one Knox claimed was the best thing on earth even though it was really quite simple.
Betty had flitted happily in and out of the kitchen, and Colt had sat at the table while I worked, talking to the boys about nothing in particular.
Just easy conversation. The kind a family has.
After dinner, I’d had an idea.
There was a box of early photos on a shelf in Betty’s hallway—scan pictures, bump photos, birth photos, years’ worth of moments after.
I’d been thinking about it for a couple of days without quite naming why.
Colt had missed all of it. Every ordinary, specific thing that made the boys who they were—he hadn’t been there for any of it.
I couldn’t give him those years back. But I could show him some of them.
I got out the albums.
I’d spread everything across the kitchen table.
Prenatal scan photos—little blobs of grey static that Luca studied with intense concentration, as though he could identify himself in the haze.
My bump photos, a whole sequence of them Betty had taken of me standing sideways in her kitchen with my hands cradling my stomach, getting rounder and more tired-looking in each shot.
Birth photos that Betty had taken. The first picture of me holding them both, one in each arm, looking absolutely wrung out but so, so happy.
Birthdays. First steps, caught on video but freeze-framed into prints. The first time they got haircuts. Knox’s phase of wearing a cape everywhere. Luca learning to ride his bike, triumphant and filthy.
I’d told the stories as they came back to me. This was the day they refused to nap and I thought I was losing my mind. Here’s Luca after he tried to eat an entire jar of peanut butter when Betty’s back was turned. That cape-Knox wore it everywhere for four months, I have no idea what started it.
Colt had asked questions. What were they like as newborns? Were they different from each other even then? He’d had his phone out at some point and I’d noticed him photographing the photographs, careful and unhurried, making sure to get them clear. He didn’t say anything about it. Just did it.
Then, toward the end of the evening, after the boys had gone to bed, he’d said I brought something. Hold on.
He’d gone out to his truck and come back with a shoebox.
He’d set it down on the table and explained it simply, without preamble—the way he explained most things.
When I disappeared, he’d packed everything.
Our apartment, whatever was in it, anything that was ours.
Boxed it all up and put it in a storage unit in Texas because he hadn’t been able to look at it and hadn’t been able to throw it away.
When he joined Venom Riders, he’d paid a company to collect the unit and move it to storage on club grounds, where it had sat for years without him opening it.
He’d opened it last week. Gone through the boxes and found some photos, and the shoebox had been sitting in his truck since then.
He’d laid them out one by one, across the space where the boys’ photos had been. As he set each one down he said a few words.
A gas station somewhere. You insisted on paying for gas. Every single time. Never won that argument.
Me in a coat that was clearly his, sleeves past my hands. You kept it. I stopped asking for it back.
Places I didn’t recognize. A life I couldn’t remember. But the girl in those photographs was at ease—with the camera, with the man behind it, with the ordinary shape of a life she knew by heart.
And the wedding photo. Small, slightly blurred, clearly taken by someone who wasn’t a professional. Me in a white dress I didn’t remember choosing. Colt in a dark shirt and his cut, his hands around mine, looking at me like he’d never seen anything so necessary in his life.
He hadn’t said anything about that one. Just placed it last and let it sit.
I hadn’t known what to say about any of it. I’d looked at each photo for a long time.
When Colt left, he’d taken most of them back—said I could look whenever I wanted, they weren’t going anywhere. But the wedding photo, I’d asked if I could keep it. Just for a day or two.
He’d nodded once and left it on the counter.
This morning, the wedding photograph was still there where he’d left it, and I couldn’t stop looking at it.
Betty had taken the boys to a play date, and the house was quiet for once. I stood at the counter with my coffee, staring at the younger version of myself in that simple white dress. The girl in the photo looked so happy. So sure of everything.
I picked up the photograph and traced the edge with my finger.
Who were you? I thought. Who were we?
I don’t know how long I stood there, but at some point the morning light shifted, falling across the photo at a new angle.
I’m standing in a small room. Fluorescent lights overhead. Colt in front of me, holding my hands. He’s younger, softer, nervous in a way I’ve never seen him.
“I, Cliff Spencer, take you, Lilac James, to be my wife.”
His voice cracks on the word wife, and I squeeze his hands.
“To have and to hold, from this day forward. For better, for worse. For richer, for poorer.”
He’s crying. I’m crying too. I can feel the tears on my cheeks.
“In sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part.”
He slips a ring on my finger—simple silver band, nothing fancy—and his hands are shaking so badly he almost drops it. I laugh through my tears and help him steady it.
“You may kiss the bride,” someone says, and Colt’s hands cup my face like I’m made of glass, and he kisses me so gently, so reverently, that I feel it in my soul—
The photograph slipped from my fingers.
I caught it before it hit the floor, but my hands were shaking so violently I nearly dropped it again.
That was a memory. Full and vivid and real. I remembered our wedding.
I could still feel his hands on my face. Still hear the crack in his voice when he said wife. Still feel the overwhelming certainty that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
I sank onto a kitchen chair, the photograph clutched to my chest, and sobbed.
?
I was still shaky when Colt came by that evening.
I hadn’t told him about the memory. Part of me wanted to process it alone first—to sit with the weight of it, the reality that I had loved this man deeply enough to marry him, and that some part of me still carried that love even if my conscious mind couldn’t access it.
But keeping it from him felt wrong.
By the time the boys were settled in the living room arguing over what to watch on TV, I’d made a decision. I would tell him tonight. After the boys were in bed, when we had privacy.
First, though, dishes.
Such a mundane moment—Colt washing, me drying. Betty had gone to bed early, claiming a headache, and somehow Colt and I had fallen into this domestic rhythm without either of us noticing.
“Knox wants to do another riding lesson this weekend,” Colt said, scrubbing at a pot. “But only if you’re okay with it.”
“I’m okay with it.” I reached for a plate. “They love it. I’ve never seen them so excited about anything.”
“They’re naturals.” Pride warmed his voice. “Luca especially. Kid’s got instincts I’ve seen grown men struggle to develop.”
“He gets that from you, I think.”
Colt glanced at me. “Maybe. Though I like to think his stubbornness comes from you.”
“I’m not stubborn.”
“Lil baby, you’re the most stubborn woman I’ve ever—” He stopped abruptly, his face going pale. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—that just slipped out.”
Lil baby. “It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to apologize for remembering.”
He turned back to the dishes, but his movements were slower now, more careful.
“Sometimes I forget you don’t remember. You’re so much like you were before.
The way you tilt your head when you’re thinking, the way you laugh at the boys’ jokes even when they’re not funny.
It’s easy to slip back into old habits.”
“What other habits?”
He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, he didn’t look at me. “Wanting things I’ve got no right to anymore.” His voice had gone rough. “I have to remind myself of that. Constantly.”
I felt it before I understood it. “Colt—”
“I’m not saying this to pressure you.” He finally met my eyes. “I just want you to understand. To me, you’re still my wife. You’re still the woman I fell in love with all those years ago. That hasn’t changed just because you don’t remember.”
I set down the dish towel, my hands trembling slightly. “Graham told me how you were with me. Before. How you looked at me like I hung the moon.”
“I still do.” A sad smile crossed his face. “I’ll never stop.”
“I don’t know what to do with it. With how much you still feel. I keep looking at that photograph you left on my counter, trying to recognize myself in her.” I paused. “She looks so certain. And I’m here wishing I could give you back what she could.”
“I know.”
Colt dried his hands on a towel and turned to face me fully. “Can I show you something?”
I nodded, not sure what I was agreeing to.
He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. From inside, he extracted a worn photograph—creased and faded from years of being carried.
He turned it over in his hands once before holding it out. “This isn’t the one I left with you last night. Same day, different moment.”
I took it carefully. A younger version of me in the same white dress, but laughing this time—mouth open, head half-turned, catching something the camera had almost missed. And Colt beside me, not looking at whatever I was laughing at. Looking at me.
“I’ve had this one in my wallet ever since the day we got hitched.” His voice was even. “Couldn’t make myself box it up with the rest.”
He paused. “Small ceremony,” he said after a moment. “Just us, a couple of club brothers as witnesses. You didn’t want anything fancy. Said all you needed was me and a good kiss.”
He paused again. “You were so beautiful,” he said. “You are so beautiful. But that day… that day you glowed. I couldn’t believe you’d actually said yes. That someone like you wanted someone like me.”
“Someone like you?”
“A biker. A rough man with rough friends, and a rough life.” He shrugged. “You could have had anyone but you chose me.”
I touched the photo gently, tracing the smile on my younger face. “The one on my counter, she’s looking at the camera. This one, she doesn’t know she’s being photographed.”
“No,” Colt agreed. “That one’s just you.”
I stared at the girl in the photograph. Laughing. Unguarded. “Were we?” I asked. “Happy?”
“We were happy.” His voice cracked. “And then I lost you, and I spent seven years trying to convince myself I hated you because it hurt less than admitting how much I still loved you.”
The photograph blurred as tears filled my eyes. I wasn’t sure why I was crying—for the life I’d lost, for the man who’d spent years grieving me, for the boys who’d grown up without their father.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry you went through that.”
“It wasn’t your fault. None of it was your fault.” Colt reached out, hesitating just before his fingers touched my face. “Can I…?”
I nodded.
He brushed a tear from my cheek, his touch feather-light and impossibly gentle.
Something passed through me when his hand touched my face—not quite memory, not quite recognition. Something. I covered his hand with mine before I could think better of it. Held it there.
Colt went very still.
“I need to tell you something,” I said. “About this morning.”
He waited.
“I was looking at the wedding photo. The one you left on the counter. And I remembered it. Not the photo—I remembered being there. You saying your vows. Your hands were shaking so badly when you put the ring on that you almost dropped it—” My voice broke.
“You were crying. I was crying. You kissed me.”
Colt didn’t move.
“That was real,” I said. “I remember being there.”
For a long moment he didn’t move at all. Then he was pulling me into his arms, so tight I could barely breathe, his face buried in my hair.
“You remember.” His voice was wrecked against the side of my head. “Lilac.”
“I remember loving you.” I held on just as hard. “I remember being so sure.”
He held me like he was afraid to let go.
“I should have told you this morning,” I said into his shoulder. “I needed to sit with it first. I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. Just kept holding on.
After a while I eased back enough to look at him. His eyes were red. He didn’t try to hide it.
“I want to try,” I said. “That’s all I know right now.”
He pulled me back in without a word, his arms around me, his face against the side of my head. Not desperate this time. Quieter. Like a man setting something down he’d been carrying for a long time.
I let him hold me.