13. Some Lies, Some Truths
SOME LIES, SOME TRUTHS
FOX
Ilied to my wife.
Sue me.
What was I supposed to do? Hand her the truth and watch her walk away all over again?
She forgot me. Forgot how much of a dick I was—which, honestly, works in my favor.
She fucking forgot me. Forgot us. The way we hold each other, the way we fuck, make love—all of it. Gone.
And now I’m this—this mass of rage and fear and insecurity, every feeling I’ve spent my whole life refusing to experience. I was the master of stoicism. Proud of it, even.
That’s out the window now.
Turns out I’m just like every other man in love—scared shitless of losing the one person he can’t live without. Except mine doesn’t know me.
“Maybe I should go back with Dina,” she muses aloud while I’m sitting next to her, making sure she’s eating.
The hospital food isn’t bad, but I’ve been ordering from all her favorite restaurants. She doesn’t mind the food from Dina’s, but let’s face it, it’s not as good as hers.
Today, I ordered soups from the International Market—chicken noodle, sour-salty-spicy mushroom poh thaak, and khao tom. These are her three favorites from there.
She decides on the mushroom one after I give her a taste of each, so I’ll have the chicken noodle for lunch after she’s done eating.
We’re waiting to hear from Dr. Reyes when she can go home. With me.
“No, sweetheart, you’re coming home. You need the familiarity.” That is the truth, directly from Dr. Reyes.
Lucy is legally my wife, and she’s coming home with me. End of fucking story.
“But—” She pauses, licks her lips.
I bend down and brush them with mine. “Luce, you’re coming home with me even if it means I have to kidnap your pert ass.”
I have been kissing her again since yesterday.
The first time it happened was because I couldn’t help myself.
She didn’t protest, but she did move her lips away, so I had to keep it short.
Fine by me. If that’s the intimacy she’ll allow, I’ll take it.
I’ll take anything and everything she gives me until she gives me her heart, again, the one I carelessly threw away.
She narrows her eyes, shooting me a displeased look. “Is this how our marriage works? You tell me what to do, and I do it?”
It’s been five days since she woke up, and she’s been getting better and better with each day. She has a concussion, of course, no surprise there—and she’s still on painkillers, but they’re less heavy-duty than the ones she was on when she first woke up.
She still sleeps a lot as her body has a lot of healing to do, but she’s definitely less passive in the sense that she’s voicing opinions as she’s asking questions about our marriage—you know, like a fucking bystander watching a movie and giving it ratings and reviews.
“Our marriage works, sweetheart, because we live together,” I reply with a broad smile.
She levels me with a thoughtful stare.
“You’re in pain. You’re healing. Dina has to work at the diner. I am at home.” I don’t want to be a complete asshole about it, so I offer some platitudes that are extremely reasonable and practical.
But Lucy is right about one thing—our marriage did work the way she said it did. I understand the censure in her voice. We did do what I wanted to do—not that I asserted my will much. But when I did, there was no going around it.
Well, I’m going to have to learn to be flexible—even if it kills me.
“Please, sweetheart, Dina’s place is too small to accommodate the three of us.”
Now, she rolls her eyes and then winces. Yeah, moving her head isn’t something she can do without it hurting.
“Eat.” I hold up a spoon of soup, and she slurps it in.
“What do you do?” she asks when I wipe her mouth with a napkin.
“I own an event management company with Percy. It’s called B&H Events. Bennett and Hale.”
“Ah,” she murmurs.
I hold up another spoonful of soup. “I also manage the family estate.”
She eats the soup and licks her lips.
Despite the bandages, the bruise that’s still a shade that isn’t skin, she’s adorable. Beautiful. And she looks so damn cute eating her soup and looking at me with her soulful gray eyes, scanning me and my words, as if she’s trying to look inside my head and find out what I’m up to.
We decided not to tell her family about her memory loss. It was her decision. She didn’t want to worry them. So, it’s a small secret. Just Dina, Percy, me, and the entire hospital staff. But if anyone steps out of line on HIPAA and shares her medical details, I will rain hell down on them.
“What does that mean?” She leans back completely onto her pillows and shakes her head when I hold up another spoon.
She ate a quarter of the bowl, so that’s progress.
I hold up a glass of electrolyte-filled water and a straw.
She asked me three days ago why I wouldn’t let a nurse do this, and I told her it was because I was her husband and I loved her. She didn’t ask me again.
“Managing the estate?” I enquire, and when she tilts her chin, I continue, “The Bennett family has a lot of assets and investments. I manage those. We have a wealth management company that helps us.”
She thinks about it. “But you have an older brother, why doesn’t he do the family estate stuff?”
“David is an idiot.” I sit back and look at her. She has some color on her cheeks, which is not a contribution of the bruise but rather a sign of good health. “And I say that subjectively. He can’t manage money.”
“So…what work does he do?”
“He doesn’t work. No one in my family works. They live off the investments.”
She wrinkles her nose, and I smile. She did the same thing the first time I told her about my family—how my mother and sister pretend their social calendar is charity work, which is really just code for parties and balls, while David’s full-time occupation is shaving strokes off his golf handicap and charming investors who think he’s the easy mark in the Bennett family.
They keep thinking that, right up until they meet me.
“What?” she asks.
I shake my head. “You made that same expression when I told you the first time what my family does for a living.”
“It sounds like they don’t do anything,” she mutters.
I laugh and nuzzle my nose against her cheek, the one without a bruise. “God, Luce, I love you.”
She stiffens.
She doesn’t like it at all when I say that or call her sweetheart.
She’s also more careful with me, which is understandable because I’m veritably a stranger.
I’ve been learning this revised version of my wife, the one without the last two years, the one who looks at me with polite uncertainty and the slight effort of someone trying to catch a word on the tip of their tongue.
She knows I’m her husband, and she is taking that information seriously, approaching it with the same methodical attention she brings to trying out a new recipe. Still, there is no recognition underneath it, no ease, no eighteen months of accumulated shorthand.
There is also no resentment or hurt over what I said and did. That is definitely a plus.
She asks me questions with the academic air of someone conducting research on their own life, taking notes in some internal notebook.
How did we meet?
“At the diner where you work. Late at night, I wandered into your kitchen. You were making cassoulet.”
And now I tell her I fell in love with her that night—which isn’t a lie, exactly. I just never told her when it would have meant something. When she could have held onto it. But how could I tell her something I just learned myself?
How long have we been married?
“Eighteen months. Our second anniversary is six months away.”
What is our house like?
“Big, more than we need, but you make it homey with your many touches. And you planted a fig tree in the garden and put peonies along the south wall that my mother hates, but which are extraordinary.”
She lets out a short, surprised laugh. “Do I not like your mother?”
“She’s not very likable.”
She laughs again, and I file the sound away in the same place I have been filing everything since she woke, in the part of me that is done wasting my life with her.
Do we have any pets?
“No. But we’ve been thinking about getting a dog…we should do it now.”
She chuckles. “Because life is short.”
My heart seizes. “Please don’t say that.” My eyes fill with tears, and hers fill with shock. “I can’t…no jokes about that. Okay?”
She looks at me when I say that—a long, searching look. “Okay.”
She holds the look for another moment, then looks away, out the window, at the Nashville skyline in the middle distance.
“It’s strange. Not remembering. It’s like”—she pauses—“arriving somewhere you know you’ve been before, but everything is unfamiliar.”
“It’ll come back to you.”
“You seem certain about that.”
“I am.”
She looks back at me. “You seem very…I don’t know…sure about things.”
“I used to think the same thing.” I let out a self-deprecating laugh. “But I’m learning that mostly I was full of horse shit.”
She blinks and then laughs, and then, because she moves her body, she winces.
“That’s enough questions for now. It’s time for you to close your beautiful eyes and get some rest.”
She doesn’t argue, and within a few minutes her breathing deepens.
I pull out my laptop as I sit in the chair I’ve been spending more time in than I have on any other piece of furniture except my bed.
I’m not doing much work, but I’m answering urgent emails and signing whatever needs to be signed. Percy is holding fort without a single complaint. He’s given the whole team strict instructions that only he and my assistant may contact me.
I see movement by the door.
Dr. Reyes.
She jerks her chin, and I set my laptop down, brush my lips against Lucy’s cheek, whisper I’ll be back, and follow her out.
The door clicks shut behind us.
“She just fell asleep,” I tell her.
“Let’s go to the breakroom.”
I glance uneasily back at Lucy’s door.
She sighs. “Fox, she’ll be fine alone for ten minutes.”
I cock an eyebrow.
Sure. I looked away for a few days, and she ended up here. I’m never taking my eyes off her again.
But saying that out loud would get me sent for a psych evaluation, so I follow Dr. Reyes.
“I’ll be honest,” she says, pouring us both the terrible, inevitable hospital coffee, “you’re not what I expected when I first saw you. A devoted husband, I mean. You didn’t look the type.”
I’ve drunk so much coffee these past few days that, honestly, it could taste like horse piss and I wouldn’t know. My taste buds are shot, and probably my stomach lining too. But it keeps me upright, so….
“What type did I look like?” I ask, after taking a sip of coffee, which, yes, tastes like what you think horse piss would.
She gives me a measured look over the rim of her cup. “The kind who has someone else handle the difficult parts.”
Fair enough. I don’t argue with her.
“So…how is she?”
Dr. Reyes sets her cup down. “The swelling has resolved cleanly. The ribs will take six to eight weeks—she needs to be careful, no sudden movements, nothing strenuous. The lacerations are healing well, better than we expected.” She pauses. “Physically, Fox, she’s going to be fine.”
“And the memory?”
“Retrograde amnesia following a traumatic brain injury is”—she pauses as if choosing her words carefully—“unpredictable. The memories may return gradually. Fragments first, then more. Triggered by something familiar—a smell, a place, a feeling.” She meets my eyes.
“Or they may not return at all. I won’t lie to you about that. ”
She said that before, so I already know this. I’ve also read everything there is to read about the subject while Lucy sleeps.
“What I will tell you,” Dr. Reyes continues, “is that the environment she goes home to matters. Stress will not help her. Familiarity will. Patience will.”
She looks at me steadily when she says patience. I nod. Oh, I’ll be the most patient motherfucker known to mankind.
“She can go home the day after tomorrow.” She smiles when my eyes brighten. “Keep her calm. Keep her comfortable. Let her ask her questions.”
I drain the rest of the terrible coffee.
“Thank you. For all of it.”
She nods once, picks up her clipboard, and heads for the door. Then she stops.
“Fox.” She doesn’t turn around. “Whatever happened between the two of you before, she gets a clean slate now. Whether you deserve one is up to you.”
She’s gone before I can tell her to mind her own fucking business. But, fuck, she’s not wrong.
I stand in the breakroom for a moment, absorbing the buzzing fluorescent light and the smell of burnt coffee and industrial cleaning fluid, and I think about clean slates and what I’m going to do with mine.
I’m going to give myself to my wife and to living a full life.
I’m not going to waste a single second choosing stoicism over honesty.
Sure, I’m taking advantage of her condition. She doesn’t remember what she lost, so I’m handing her back a marriage I wanted to discard, dressed up as one I never once questioned.
This is not a move without risk. I know that.
Somewhere underneath the amnesia, the real Lucy knows. I just need to make sure that by the time she remembers everything, she has new truths she believes—that I love her and that every lie I tell her is one she can forgive.
Alright, Fox, time to get to work, buddy.
Then I throw the cup away and go back to my wife to do that work.