Round Forty-Four #2
Relief washes through his features, his breath coming out on an explosive exhale, and with it, his chest shrinks fractionally.
He steps into the room and holds the door handle as Ramone comes in last, then he closes the door with a soft snick, pressing his back to the wood and electing himself our sentry.
“Do you recognize him, Rose?” Ollie massages the back of my neck with his fingertips, angling me around to get a look at the man sitting at a steel table in the next room.
He’s not wearing sunglasses this time. No hat.
Not even a smile. Instead, he stares right at me, like the glass works like normal windows do.
“C-can he see us?” I press my hand to my curdling stomach. “I think he can see us.”
“No. He can’t.” Billy picks up a manila file and flips it open. “Dude is thirty-two. November birthday. He’s a civil engineer and runs his own firm out in Seattle. Employs a couple dozen people and maintains a pretty steady stream of business. All except the last few months.”
He brings his eyes up and stops on mine.
I gulp.
“Business slipped a little since February, but he’s not a one-man show, and his staff are still completing projects, so the company is still doing okay. He’s not married. Never married. No children.”
Not married. I look down at my hand, at the ring finger on my left. “Good.”
“His parents are still alive, still healthy and independent. He has two brothers, both married, both with young kids. He’s the youngest of the three.”
“Rap sheet?” Ollie rasps. “Anything worth mentioning?”
“No record. No prints. No arrests. Not even a speeding ticket. He pays his taxes on time, every time, pays his employees above board, and, when I looked into his company, the reviews are all positive. There are no blemishes attached to his name. Not even a post-it note cops are apt to leave for the next uniform to read.”
“W-what’s his name?” I question. Blinking, blinking, blinking, I bring my eyes back to the man on the other side of the glass. “Do you know it?”
“Bisek.” He peeks down at the file in front of him. “Darcy Bisek.”
Ollie drops his head back and groans. “Fuck.”
“Darcy,” I whisper, each sound, each syllable shaking on my tongue. “H-his name is Darcy?”
“He says he’s your fiancé, Rose.” Ramone comes around and settles on the lip of the window, his back to the glass separating us from Darcy. “He says you’ve been together for seven years, got engaged late last year, and you were set to marry next winter.”
Heavy, boiling tears spill onto my cheek, scorching a line all the way to my jaw, then dripping off the sharp edge to splash on my shirt. On my hand. On Poppy.
“He brought proof.” Exhaling a long sigh, Billy flips through his file and organizes a small stack of photographs. “He gave us his phone and full permission to search it. Told us to check the photo albums to see that he was telling the truth.”
He offers the pictures, but I don’t take them. I can’t. I’m holding Poppy in one hand and clinging to my sanity with the other, anchoring myself to Ollie’s hip. But Ollie takes them. Exhaling a shaking breath, he clears his throat and turns the stack over.
Immediately, I’m assaulted with an image of me… laughing, mouth open, eyes squinting, and my arms wrapped around the man on the other side of the glass.
The next picture is of the two of us posing on a beach. Him in green and yellow board shorts, me in a blood red bikini. His lips pressed to my temple while I smiled for whoever was snapping the photo.
In another picture, I’m wearing a shimmering silver gown that stretches all the way to the floor, my hair tied back, but with sections of it curled so the ends delicately kiss my shoulders. And he… Darcy, stands right beside me in a suit and a black bow tie.
I’m happy in every picture. Smiling. Hugging him with my hand… God. My hand anchored to his hip.
“I think I’m going to puke.” I step out from beneath Ollie’s arm and walk to the back wall, turning and sliding all the way to the floor.
Folding my legs up, tucking my heels as close to my butt as I can, I hug my knees and drift into a world where just Poppy and I exist. Where there are no fiancés, or memory loss, or a man just feet away, claiming I love him.
It’s not possible. Because I love Ollie.
“Do we know if the photos are real?” Cliff strides across the room and stares down at the pictures. “With technology these days, and all that AI bullshit flinging around, how can we know—”
“They’re coming up legit for us so far,” Ramone cuts in. “We’ll send them away for testing so we know for sure, but time-stamps confirm what he’s saying. Geo-stamps, too. There’s one picture in there of them in Paris.”
I choke on my tears, clamping my lips shut to trap the sound inside.
“His passport confirms he was traveling through Europe at the same time. He was in Paris on the date the photo was taken, and he was with a woman named Rosaline Valera.”
Whimpering, I look up in time to watch him pass a new sheet of paper across to Ollie.
“Rosaline Valera is twenty-five years old. February twenty-eighth birthday.”
“February?” Ollie groans, his shimmering eyes stopping on mine. “You had a birthday and we didn’t even know it?”
“He was here by seven o’clock this morning,” Ramone adds. “Polite. Dressed well. Speaks well. We put him in observation and left him for an hour without explaining where we were going or when we’d be back.”
“He hasn’t lost his temper,” Billy continues.
“Hasn’t demanded anything. Hasn’t dropped his composure.
An hour in a small room inside the police station is enough to make a lot of guys shake.
Their stories change. Their bravado flees.
But not him. He just wants to see her.” He looks to me.
“He just wants to see you, Rose. He wants to know you’re okay. ”
“He did see her,” Cliff snarls. “Yesterday! He swung by the warehouse and smiled at her. Didn’t say shit about being her fiancé. Didn’t say her name. Didn’t rush forward and declare his love for this woman he claims to be marrying.”
“That’s suspicious, right?” I swallow the aching lump in my throat, inhaling and shuddering, then exhaling again and burying my face in Poppy’s fur. “Why would he do all that yesterday, and ask Cliff questions, if he is who he says he is?”
“If my fiancée disappeared, got hurt, lost her memory, and months later, I finally found her again, I’m not gonna swing by her workplace and play coy,” Ollie growls. “I’m gonna sweep her up and tell her who I am. Remind her what we are.”
“It’s not the best first impression,” Ramone concedes. “But humans are inherently flawed. If he saw her on the news and heard about her memory loss, it’s entirely reasonable he’d walk by just to see how she responded.”
“That’s bullshit! Love isn’t wandering by and moving on. Love isn’t waiting three fucking months before you show your face again.”
“W-what do you want me to do?” I swipe my nose with my sleeve. “What should I do?”
“Whatever you want to do,” Ollie insists. “You don’t know that man, and just because he says you were engaged doesn’t make it true. You weren’t wearing a ring when you ended up in the ER. You don’t recognize his face. You don’t—”
“I said his name.” I tilt my head back and close my eyes, groaning like Darcy’s presence is an actual, physical pain. “You said I said his name that time.”
“It was one time. You were talking in your sleep and didn’t even remember it when you woke up.”
“But she knows him,” Ramone presses. “Fiancé or not, he has proof they were close.”
“And she’s not freaking out,” Cliff adds.
In response, I sniffle and peel my eyes open again.
“Like, you’re not handling it well,” he amends, dragging his fingers through his hair.
“But this is not the same reaction you have when you’re terrified of someone.
When a smell sets you off, you lose your shit.
When a memory hits that scares you, we know you’re scared.
” He lowers his hand again, shaking his head. “This is not the same.”
“We’ve talked to him.” Billy closes the file and strolls across the room.
Stopping right in front of me, he lowers into a crouch.
“We’ve run through his past as thoroughly as we can, Rose.
We’ve got feelers out to see if anyone else has something to add.
But in the meantime, he seems legit. He has no history of violence and hasn’t thrown out any red flags since we put him in that room.
He’s staying at a bed and breakfast across town, so I called Camille, the owner, and asked her about him.
She said he’s been polite. Clean. Respectful.
Normal.” He rests his elbows on his knees, his hand and the file dangling between his legs.
“That’s the word she used. Normal. She said he joined them for dinner last night, and like she always does with her guests, she asks about them.
About their life. And everything he told her is lining up with what we already know: civil engineering, business owner, no kids, not yet married.
When she asked why he was traveling, he said it was personal and left it at that.
He didn’t ask her about you, even though there isn’t a soul in town who hasn’t talked about you in some way or another.
He went off to his room a little before nine, and didn’t stir again until six. ”
I clamp my lips shut and grit my jaw, if only to still the way it trembles. I sniffle again, loathing the weakness, and because she whines, I scratch the back of Poppy’s ear.
“So I guess the next move is yours.” Billy’s lips crinkle carefully to the side. It’s a smile… ish. “Since the start, this has always been about finding answers for you. It’s about helping you rediscover what you lost.”
“You want me to talk to him?” I swipe the fresh tears from my eyes, my breath coming out on a shuddering exhale as I glance past him and stop on Ollie. Silent. Stoic. Devastated.
“I think he’s worth talking to,” Billy counters. “For you. Not for him.”
“He has the answers you’ve been looking for.” Ramone rolls his bottom lip between his thumb and finger. His back, still pressed to the glass. “He knows things you’ve forgotten, and he’s given us no reason to doubt him so far.”
“Except that he came skulking around yesterday,” Cliff growls. “That’s not a normal thing to do!”
“Would you prefer if he walked in and threw himself at her?” Ramone counters.
“Gets eyes on her, knows about her memory loss, but doesn’t give a shit about how it affects her, so he grabs on and acts like nothing has changed.
Fiancés kiss. They hug. They touch. He could’ve snatched her hand and pulled her in, like this is some Disney movie and all she needs to get better is a kiss. ”
Ollie lifts his arms and links his hands behind his head, his eyes burning with emotion he tries so hard to lock inside. His chest, growing with adrenaline he keeps bottled up.
“It’s your call,” Billy murmurs. “But I think sending him away without talking to him would be a mistake.”