Chapter 49
Sabrina didn’t sleep well that night. The name “Polly Potter” rolled around in her brain as if it were a sole piece of laundry
caught up in a very fast spin cycle. She couldn’t be Polly Potter. Polly was someone different. She’d worked with her in the
past, she was sure. She was a business analyst too and had a partner called Chris and he had a sister who was a bit of a nightmare
and Chris had a son whom Polly really liked and a daughter she was wary of. She remembered more about Polly than she did herself.
And Polly used to live next door to people who had a ginger cat and she’d feed it cheese and...
Sabrina groaned into her pillow. She was Polly; all the facts said so, but she didn’t feel like her. They were like different people, but at the same time one had
obviously become the other; they blurred and crossed, switched and swapped. So where did Polly end and Sabrina start? None
of it made any sense, and besides, Sabrina Anderson was her anchor in this madness; her identity was one of the only things
she had been sure of, and yet it had been a lie. Where did that leave her?
There was an emergency number in the passport for Will Barrett.
Sabrina would ring him first thing in the morning; it was too late by the time they got home after work.
Teddy had driven her and Marielle home in a strangely somber mood after such a jolly evening.
She knew how he felt. Finally knowing who she was should have been a cause for celebration, and yet all she felt was confusion and dread.
“You don’t have to go back yet,” Teddy had told her before he left. “I for one don’t feel comfortable placing you in the hands
of people you might not even recognize. Stay and build the relationship from here, if that’s what you want to do.”
She didn’t want to go back, but the time had come when she had to. Her head hurt thinking about it: being sure she was one
person when in fact she was another, remembering things that hadn’t happened, forgetting things that had. She was sick of
it all. She couldn’t live being more holes than whole; she needed to fill in the missing spaces, and it was taking too long
to do that being so far away from wherever she—Polly—came from.
What really swung it for her was that these good people had their own lives to attend to, especially given the dynamite that
Cilla had thrown into the middle of them. They needed to concentrate on recalibrating and repairing after that, not worry
about her anymore. They should prioritize themselves, not her. She had to help herself from now on.
So lying awake, staring at the ceiling, she formulated a plan she would stick to. Tomorrow she would go back to the life of
Polly Potter and take it from there. The doctors at the hospital had already warned her that the restoration of emotional
connections might lag behind everything else, but with self-imposed psychological blockages, there was no definitive guidebook,
no logical order of how things would play out, no promises or guarantees. Her best shot at full recovery was going home, even
if by the definition of the word, home felt like where she was now and not where she was bound for.