Chapter 8 #2
I’d already bought the ring after our first official date. I’d kept it hidden for months, carrying the little box with me through every day without knowing exactly when I’d be brave enough to use it.
I’d planned the entire day around her.
We’d start with laser tag because I loved watching her become fiercely competitive, that spark in her eyes appearing the second she had someone to beat.
Then we’d go to an escape room because there was something addictive about watching her brilliant mind work, seeing her narrow her attention until nothing existed except the problem in front of her.
I loved those moments more than she knew, when she’d become completely absorbed, piecing everything together with that sharp concentration and then looking so unbearably pleased with herself when she’d solved it.
And after that, I’d take her back to the café where we’d first met.
I’d get down on one knee.
I’d give her the ring.
I’d finally give her something so enormous, so unmistakable, that she would never again have to wonder whether I loved her.
At least, that was how I’d imagined it.
But when I arrived at her apartment that day, I barely made it through the door before she rushed toward me, her face flushed, her breathing uneven, her eyes shining with an excitement I hadn’t expected.
Then she blurted it out.
“Will you marry me?”
I didn’t even let her finish.
“Yes.”
The answer tore out of me so fast it almost sounded desperate.
I caught her around the waist and pulled her against me, a disbelieving laugh breaking from my chest as I lifted her off the floor.
She laughed too, startled and delighted, her arms winding around my shoulders as I kissed her again and again, unable to stop smiling.
For the first time in my life, I hadn’t needed to scramble for some grand way to wipe the disappointment from someone’s face. I hadn’t needed to earn my way back from the words I couldn’t say, or bury my silence beneath another achievement, another sacrifice, another extravagant gesture.
She had simply understood me.
I held her tighter, burying my face in her hair as I let myself sink into the feeling I had spent years chasing. Maybe I’d finally gotten it right. Maybe I had finally found a way to love someone without constantly worrying that I wasn’t giving them enough.
I convinced myself that she wouldn’t have asked me to marry her if she truly doubted what I felt.
She wouldn’t have taken my hand and asked me to spend the rest of my life with her if my silence had left her questioning whether I loved her.
She had to understand. She had to see all the things I had been trying to tell her without ever saying them.
My actions were my language.
And that day, I believed she had finally learned how to read me.
So I stopped being afraid of my silence.
I stopped wondering whether the things I did were enough. I stopped searching her face for signs that I’d disappointed her again. I thought we were fine.
I truly believed we were.
But then she asked me that question that night, and my entire world stopped.
“Do you love me?”
Four ordinary words.
Four words that struck with enough force to steal the air from my lungs.
I stared at her, unable to comprehend what I was hearing. My wife stood before me with tears gathering in her eyes, looking at me with a hurt I had put there, searching my face for an answer I should have given her long before she ever had to ask.
How had we reached this point?
How had I managed to make the woman I loved feel so unloved that she had to stand in front of me and ask?
I hated myself for it.
I hated that I had made the woman I loved question something that had always been so painfully true inside me.
I hated that she had reached the point where she needed to ask because I had failed to make her feel the answer.
Most of all, I hated that even then, with her heart breaking right in front of me, my body betrayed me the same way it always had.
I tried to speak. I tried to force the words up from somewhere deep inside me.
I pushed my jaw open, dragged in a breath, fought against the panic squeezing my throat shut.
My lips parted, but nothing came. I could feel the words trapped inside me, begging to be released, while my body betrayed me all over again.
She waited.
And I watched the hope in her eyes collapse beneath the weight of my silence.
In that silence, I failed her. Then, in the screech of tires and shattering glass, I failed her all over again.
When she finally woke up in that hospital, relief hit me so violently that my knees nearly gave out beneath me.
For days, I’d been sitting beside her bed, watching the rise and fall of her chest, terrified that every breath might be her last. I’d listened to the machines, watched the numbers change, counted every tiny movement she made because I needed something—anything—to tell me she was still here.
I talked to her when she couldn’t answer me.
I told her about the weather, about work, about the stupid little things that would have bored anyone else to death.
I told her stories she’d heard a hundred times and complained about problems that didn’t matter, anything that gave me an excuse to keep talking to her.
Because silence terrified me.
As long as I was speaking, I could pretend she was listening.
I could imagine the familiar roll of her eyes, the smile she’d try to hide, the little comments she would have thrown back at me.
I could pretend we were still us, that she was going to interrupt me at any moment and tell me I was being ridiculous.
So I kept talking.
When she finally spoke to me, I thought I had been given a second chance.
Until she asked, “Who are you?”
Everything inside me stopped.
For the rest of that day, I clung to the hope that she was pretending. That beneath that unfamiliar stare was the woman who knew me better than anyone, deliberately making me suffer for every time I’d made her question whether I loved her.
I needed that to be true.
Because if she was angry with me, I could fix it.
I could get down on my knees and beg. I could apologize until my throat gave out. I could spend every remaining day of my life trying to make amends. I would have taken her hatred, her resentment, every cruel word she had left to throw at me, and I would have accepted it all without complaint.
Anger meant she remembered me.
Anger meant she remembered us.
Anger meant there was still something between us worth fighting for.
But she wasn’t pretending.
She had truly forgotten me. To her, I was a stranger.
The woman who had once known me better than anyone had no idea who I was. The life we’d built together, the nights we’d shared, the laughter and fights and countless ordinary moments that had made us who we were—all of it remained inside me alone.
This was my reality.
A living nightmare.
So I did the only thing I could. I clung to her. I became a ghost in her doorway, a shadow in her life. I made myself a fixture she couldn’t ignore. I would use this one chance, this sliver of an opportunity, to make her see me again.
One chance to make my wife remember me.
To make her remember us.
I was not going to let that chance slip away.
No matter what.
I set the pan aside, her breakfast finally finished, and began plating it. The scrape of footsteps against the floor made me turn, and there she was, already dressed for work. My hands stilled over the plate, every thought abandoned.
My gaze moved slowly over her, taking in every familiar detail I had spent days terrified I would never see again.
The clothes she had chosen for work. Her hair falling around her face.
That faint crease near her temple left behind by sleep.
I had seen those things a thousand times, but now I found myself staring at them with an almost desperate attention, storing them away one by one.
I wanted to imprint the sight of her standing there so deeply into my mind that no nightmare could ever erase the memory of her being alive and within my reach.
For days, I had been surrounded by the sterile smell of the hospital and the relentless beeping of machines, terrified that I would walk out of those doors without her.
Every sound had kept me on edge, every pause between the monitors’ beeps threatening to become something I could never recover from.
Now there was none of that.
No blood. No shattered glass. No frantic voices shouting for help.
Just my wife, standing in our kitchen, already thinking about work while the morning stretched out before her.
It should have been ordinary.
Instead, it felt sacred.
After coming so close to losing her, I couldn’t look at a morning such as this without understanding how easily it could have been taken from me. She had no idea what that simple sight meant to me, how much I would have given to have another morning exactly like this.
I swallowed against the ache climbing into my throat and turned back to her breakfast before she could read too much in my face.
For years, I’d moved through mornings such as this without giving them a second thought.
I’d watched her walk into a room, listened to her complain about being late, made her breakfast, and carried on with my day.
I had mistaken familiarity for permanence, never considering that the life I took for granted could disappear in a single, terrible moment.
The accident had taught me otherwise.
Now every ordinary moment carried a weight it never had before. Every time she walked away from me, some part of my mind followed, already imagining the possibility of never seeing her return.
I looked at her again.
She was right there.
Alive. Safe. Close enough for me to reach.
And still, fear curled beneath my gratitude.
What if I lost her again?
She stepped closer to the table and eyed the breakfast spread with deep suspicion, her brows drawing together as she inspected it.
“What is this?”