Chapter 34 #2
“I was planning to do it anyway,” he said, “but then the Garcia deal happened. I decided it would be my last project before I stepped down.” He took another step closer. He was standing directly in front of me now. “Am I making a mistake, Alessia?”
I shook my head. The words came easy. “No. I think you’re making the right decision. It feels like this is exactly what you need.”
His face broke into a smile. Relief, pure and unguarded, lighting him from the inside. “I knew you would understand.” He moved toward me, instinctive. His head dipped, lips aiming for my forehead—
And stopped.
His hand dropped. His smile tightened, just a fraction. He pulled back, just enough to be safe, just enough to remind himself of all the reasons he shouldn’t reach for me.
I watched him do it. Watched him take all that wanting and fold it away.
And the words left me before I could stop them.
“What if I never get my memories back?”
He froze. “What?”
“What if I never get my memories back.” I said it again, slower this time.
“You said it. You said your wife is in there somewhere. You just have to remind her who she is.” I swallowed.
“What if I never remember? You want that life back, don’t you?
Our old one. Our old memories. I don’t have those.
I’ve forgotten the life. I’ve forgotten the wife. What if I never remember her?”
His face fell. Sadness crept into his eyes, softening the lines of his face and taking the warmth from his expression.
He leaned closer, his hand coming up to cup my face, no hesitation this time. His palm was warm against my cheek, his fingers threading into my hair, holding me like I was something precious, something he’d been waiting to hold.
“If you wake up tomorrow with no memory of me again,” he said, his voice barely a whisper, “I will come after you again.”
I stopped breathing.
“I would do everything again. Every clumsy, stupid, desperate thing. I would stand in that hospital room again, watching you look at me like I was a stranger, and I would feel my heart break all over again. And I would stay. I would keep showing up. I would keep trying. Because even when you didn’t know my name, you were still you.
You were still the person who made me want to be better.
Who made me want to try harder. Who made me believe I could. ”
His fingers brushed hair from my face, tucking it behind my ear, lingering there like he couldn’t bear to stop touching me.
“If I had to make you fall for me again and again for the rest of my life,” he said, and his lips curved into something that was almost a smile, trembling at the edges, “if you kept forgetting me every single day, I would do it. I would wake up every morning and introduce myself. I would tell you my name. I would tell you the story of us—the good parts and the bad parts and the parts where I failed you. And I would ask you to give me another chance. Every single day. For the rest of my life. Because it’s you.
Every version of me that has ever existed has been searching for you.
And every version of me that will ever exist will keep searching. There is no me without you.”
His eyes filled. He didn’t blink. Didn’t look away. Just let me see him, all of him, the wanting and the fear and the impossible, unrelenting hope.
“I—” He faltered, his hands still locked around me. He looked down, frustration flickering across his face, the familiar shape of a word that wouldn’t come. He tried again. “I need my hands free to tell you. But I don’t want to let go.”
I placed my hand over his, pressing his palm firmer against my cheek. His skin was warm, his fingers curving along my jaw like they’d been made to hold me.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to say it. I know.”
He was trying to say I love you. He was always trying to say it. With his hands, with his eyes, with the way he showed up and stayed and kept showing up.
“You remember I told you that those words scared me?” His voice was quiet, like he was confessing something he’d never told anyone else. “That something bad always happened after they were said?”
I nodded.
“Nothing bad ever happened after you said them.” His thumb traced the curve of my cheekbone, slow and absent. “Every time you said those words to me, my life got better. Brighter. Like I was finally doing something right. Like I wasn’t the person my mother told me I was.”
His lips trembled. “The bad thing only happened when I didn’t say them.
When I let the fear win. When I stood in that doorway and watched you leave and couldn’t make myself say the one thing that might have made you stay.
I regret that night. I regret those months.
I regret all the mornings I woke up next to you and didn’t tell you what you meant to me. What you are to me.”
Tears spilled down his face. I reached up and wiped them away, my thumb brushing the wetness from his skin, and he leaned into my touch like he was starving for it.
“You look so beautiful,” he said.
A watery laugh escaped me. “What does that have to do with anything right now?”
He caught the tear sliding down my face, wiping it away with the pad of his thumb. His eyes never left mine.
“You are so beautiful that I forget to breathe when I look at you. I forget there’s a world outside this room.
I forget everything—every failure, every regret, every reason I told myself I didn’t deserve you.
” His voice was soft, almost wondering. “How can I not mention it? Every minute of every day, I am aware. Of your laugh when you think no one is watching—it’s the sound I hear when I need to remember what happiness feels like.
The way your head tilts when you’re solving something—I’ve spent hours watching you work, watching the pieces click into place behind your eyes. ”
His hand slid into my hair, cradling the back of my head.
“When you say my name and I can hear the laugh you’re trying to swallow—I want to bottle that sound.
When your hands move through the air, mapping out something you believe in, something you’ve figured out, something you need me to understand—I could watch you for hours. ”
He pulled me closer, his forehead resting against mine.
“I notice everything about you, Alessia. I can’t stop.
I don’t want to stop. You are a collection of moments I will spend the rest of my life trying to memorize, and I will still never have enough.
You don’t have to remember anything. I will remember for both of us.
Just stay with me. Just let me make more memories.
Let me fill the spaces you forgot with something new.
Let me earn the right to keep noticing. Keep watching.
Keep learning the shape of you for the rest of my life. ”
“Is this one of those speeches you kept talking about?” I barely recognized my own voice.
“It’s one of them.” He was trying to smile, trying to lighten the weight between us, but his hands were still shaking against my face. His eyes were still wet. And he was still looking at me like I was the only thing in the room worth seeing.
I could feel his heartbeat through his palms, or maybe that was mine. I couldn’t tell anymore. They had found the same rhythm a long time ago.
I kept staring at his face. The words were building in my chest, pressing against my ribs, demanding to be let out. I’d been carrying them for so long, this fear that sat in my bones like something I’d been born with.
“What if you abandoned me again?”
The words were barely audible. I almost didn’t say them. Almost let them stay buried where they’d been living, where I’d learned to keep them. But they were out now, hanging in the space between us, and I couldn’t take them back.
His face crumbled. The way a building falls when the foundation is pulled out from under it. His eyes, his mouth, the careful composure he’d been holding—all of it gone, replaced by something raw and wounded and real.
“It turns out I’m very easy to abandon.” The words came out thin, stretched, pulled from somewhere I didn’t know was still open. “So what if you do it again—”
He pulled me into his arms before I could finish. His arms were tight around me, so tight I could barely breathe, like he was trying to press the words back into my chest, to undo them.
“I’m sorry.” His voice was muffled against my neck, but I heard every word. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t abandon you. I know that’s what it looked like, but I didn’t. I never intended to. I’m sorry.”
He kept saying it. Over and over, like if he said it enough times I might believe it. Like he needed to hear it as much as I did.
“I was drowning, and I thought you would always be there. I thought you were the one thing in my life that was certain. The one person who couldn’t be taken from me. I was so wrong.”
He pulled back just enough to look at me. His face was wet, his eyes red, his expression raw in a way I had never seen.
“I didn’t leave you, Alessia.” His voice broke on my name.
“I just never thought you’d want to leave me.
Because we were solid. Because we were us.
But then you did leave. And you had every right to.
I ruined everything. I made you walk away.
And ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out how to live in a world where you don’t know my name.
Where you look at me and feel nothing. Where the one person who knew me better than anyone else doesn’t remember a single thing about who I am.
“I will never do that again.” The words were fierce, trembling, torn from somewhere deep.
“I will never let the water close over my head while you’re standing on the shore, waiting for me to come up.
I will never assume you’ll be there tomorrow without making sure you know—today, now, in every moment I’m given—that I choose you.
Over every deal. Every crisis. Every time.
Without hesitation. Without reservation. You. Always you.”