Chapter 7
The muffled sound of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” wakes me up the next morning.
I pull my duvet up around my chin and squeeze my eyes shut, willing myself back to sleep.
Yes, I should probably be excited about meeting Matt for coffee in a few hours, and my doctor’s appointment afterward, but this bed is so comfortable, and I had been having the best dream about long blond hair and megayachts.
Then a car horn blares from somewhere outside, followed by a long string of profanities.
My eyes snap open and I remember: Oh yes, I am in hell.
As if to prove my point, “Dancing Queen” ends, only to immediately begin again from somewhere downstairs.
I roll over to my stomach and open my eyes to look around at what is apparently my bedroom. Is that music coming from the apartment downstairs? How thin are these walls? Am I still dreaming?
When the song starts for a third time, I get up and shuffle over to the kitchen to make a cup of tea.
I fill the kettle and put it on the stovetop, then lean a hip against the counter and stare at the items tacked up on the corkboard while I wait for it to boil.
There’s a napkin from a coffee shop called Strange Brew.
A receipt from the Brattle Book Shop. Two movie theater ticket stubs for Rear Window.
I’ve always tended toward sentimentality.
When I was six, I had a crush on Justin Webber, a boy in my first-grade class whose mother packed a Jolly Rancher in his lunch every day.
Once, when no one was looking, I discreetly saved the wrapper from one and hid it under my pillow.
In my mind, that was the safest spot imaginable—until my grandmother changed my sheets a few days later.
I cried myself to sleep that night, but I also learned an important lesson: If I wanted to hold on to small, seemingly insignificant mementos, I had to keep them somewhere safe. Like a corkboard.
I stare at the items tacked up there now. What had I been up to this past year?
The kettle begins to wail. I absently reach into the cabinet for a mug, placing it on the counter and throwing a tea bag in before I really look at it.
When I do, I pause. It’s white, with blue text on the side that is too faded to make out from numerous washings.
But I know exactly what it says: PARADISE COVE BEACH CAFé.
In an instant, a flood of memories come back to me: walking down from my grandmother’s bungalow barefoot, ordering a strawberry milkshake to drink in the beach chairs and only being able to make it through half of it.
For a brief moment I can actually feel the sand between my toes.
Smell the ocean salt and taste the ice cream. All from a completely ordinary mug.
I fill it with steaming water and cradle it in my hands as a kernel of an idea plants itself in my brain. I turn back to the corkboard.
My memories are in my brain somewhere, I know they are. I just need to find the right thing to trigger them.
The idea is still rattling around in my brain an hour later when the car that picked me up for my doctor’s appointment comes to a stop outside the hospital.
The coffee shop where I’m meeting Matt is just across the street, but as I step out onto the sidewalk and see Mass General looming in front of me, all other thoughts bottom out of my head.
I only left yesterday, yet my body has a visceral reaction to being back, like it remembers exactly how I arrived there, even if my brain doesn’t.
I cross the street to the coffee shop, working so hard to ignore how my heart pounds, how my hands shake as I cling to my purse, I almost walk past Matt without noticing him.
He’s standing by the doorway, his blond head bent down as he stares at his phone, so he misses my double take.
I’m not used to seeing him in a suit. Back in LA, the most his job required was khakis and a button-down, and even that was only when there was a client lunch. Most days he was in a T-shirt, huddled behind a computer, writing code to secure huge data centers all over the world.
Apparently, the folks in Boston are more demanding about dress code.
His navy blue suit and maroon tie render him almost unrecognizable.
I probably would have walked right by him if it wasn’t for the way he was leaning against the lamppost, one leg crossed over the other.
Matt has a very specific lean, one he claims he adopted to try to blend in after a growth spurt in fifth grade shot him towering above his classmates.
From then on, he was tall and lanky, but now more grown-up, too.
“Hi,” I say, stopping a few feet in front of him.
He looks up, his blue eyes wide with surprise, and for a moment I worry he’s not there to meet me at all and this is just a random coincidence.
Then his gaze meets mine and he smiles. His blond hair is shorter than the last time I saw him, when he left for Boston and I kissed him goodbye at the airport.
But that wasn’t the last time I saw him, was it?
Suddenly, the reality of where I am and what’s happened hits me all over again.
“Hey,” he says.
I almost step forward to give him a hug, half expecting one of his signature kisses on the top of my head.
But he doesn’t open his arms like I’m used to.
Instead, he just slides his phone into his pocket.
It almost feels awkward, like running into an old friend from college you haven’t seen in years, and now you’re struggling to remember why you were friends at all.
He seems to be thinking the same thing because he shifts his weight and clears his throat.
“Sorry, I was just going through a few work emails,” he says.
I nod. “Everything okay?”
He shrugs one shoulder as he lets out a long sigh. “Probably not.”
I smile. Finally, a hint of the Matt I remember. “Sounds like you need some coffee.”
He smiles, too, then motions toward the nearby door.
Inside, the coffee shop is sterile and gray.
Even if you didn’t know the hospital was nearby, you could tell by the clientele, a scattering of white coats and blue scrubs, all with an air of exhaustion.
Matt and I go to the counter, where I order a tea and he orders a latte.
Then we navigate the haphazard collection of tables and chairs to a long metal counter along the window.
It’s a moment that’s almost normal, similar to thousands we’ve had before, but this time there’s an unfamiliar politeness, manners that never existed between us but now feel required.
“Is this spot okay?”
“Sure, does it work for you?”
“Yes, this is good. Do you want to sit—”
“Oh, sorry…”
“No, no, you go ahead…”
By the time we settle into our seats, the air is heavy with that same stiffness from the sidewalk.
It’s ironic, in a way. When we were getting ready to move, I had prepared myself for at least a little bit of awkwardness.
Matt and I had spent our entire relationship as part of a larger whole: Garrett and Sara, Matt and Marnie.
In Boston we would be on our own, defining exactly what Matt and Marnie, the singular unit, would be.
I guess we never figured it out.
“Thanks for meeting up,” I say, as if the moment calls for it. And who knows? Maybe it does. “Especially right after being out of town. Work is probably crazy right now.”
“It’s okay. Work is always crazy. Besides, this is important,” he says, then takes another sip of his latte.
Silence descends again. My innate desire to fill it is almost unbearable, but I also don’t know where to start. I want to prod him, push and poke for any answer I can get until I arrive at wherever we ended up. A place he knows how to navigate while I’m left completely in the dark.
“I’m sorry, by the way,” he continues after a moment. “For that phone call while you were in the hospital. You were already dealing with a lot, I should have just shut up and waited for the right time to tell you everything.”
“To be fair, I’m not sure there’s a right time to tell your girlfriend with retrograde amnesia that the two of you broke up after moving across the country together,” I say.
He nods, his smile returning for a moment. “Very true.”
I let another moment pass before I ask, “So what happened?”
He releases a long breath, as if he had been holding it until we arrived at this question. And even though I don’t have the courage to ask outright, I know he reads between the lines: Why did we break up?
“I don’t know if it was just one thing,” he replies. “Just… a lot of things piled up.”
Part of me wants to roll my eyes at another one of Matt’s signature nonanswers.
Words strung together that don’t really tell you anything at all.
But I have to admit there’s truth in there, too.
Even before Boston, Matt and I had been feeling the strain.
Living together had been punctuated by expectation and stress.
On top of Sara’s not-so-subtle hints that we should just get engaged already, I was struggling with the day-to-day monotony at Probus, while Matt put in extra hours in the hopes of getting a promotion.
When it finally came through, he warned me about how much more he would be working, how he wouldn’t be present as much as he might want.
Full disclosure, he’d said at the time. It had eventually become an inside joke, a code for when we had a confession to make, however small.
Full disclosure, when I was at the coffee shop today, I spent eleven dollars on something called “cloud coffee.”
Full disclosure, I was up until two a.m. playing Call of Duty.
Then, when the promotion required him to relocate to Boston and he asked me to come with him, I almost wished I could use our joke as a lifeline, a way to talk about my concerns, my fears.
Full disclosure, I don’t know what I’m doing with my life and I worry that I’ll just be swallowed up into yours.
I never did, though.
“Was it the move?” I ask.
Matt seems to consider as he strums his fingers against his cup.
“The move was stressful, yeah. You arrived a few weeks after I did, and I’d already fallen into a rhythm at work.
Long hours, weekends, it was bad. When I was here alone, it only affected me.
But then you arrived and we never saw each other. It all just got really hard.”
The comment feels awkward, like it’s missing some key component, but I can’t quite place it.
“When was the last time we saw each other?”
Matt sighs. “We actually met up for drinks the day of the accident.”
A spark of recognition flares in my brain. Sara had mentioned something like that, hadn’t she? How Matt and I met up right before my injury to talk about getting back together.
“But I thought you were in Toronto,” I say.
“I left the day after. I didn’t know what happened to you, or I wouldn’t have…” He sighs again, this time with a shrug. “Anyway, I didn’t know anything until the hospital called me.”
I stare down into my tea, trying to organize a thousand different questions spinning in my head. “But if we broke up six months ago, why did we meet for drinks?”
He leans back, like he’s thinking very carefully about what words to say next. “We hadn’t talked much since the breakup. There was a lot that we didn’t get a chance to say.”
I have no idea what that means, but before I can ask, his phone rings, sending a tinny melody through the air. He pulls it from his jacket pocket and glances at the screen. Whatever name he sees there makes him nervous, a microexpression that no one but me would probably notice.
“Sorry, it’s work.” He flashes me an apologetic smile, then turns to take the call, leaving me with a view of his profile.
When Sara first told me she was going to set me up with Garrett’s friend Matt, she had described him first and foremost as ridiculously handsome. He has such a strong nose, she had said. A politician’s nose.
I never knew what she meant by that, but ultimately, it didn’t matter.
All that mattered was that Sara thought he would be perfect for me.
And just a few weeks later, Matt became a regular fixture in my life, slotting in so seamlessly, I barely noticed the change.
How had I extracted myself from that so spectacularly?
Matt hangs up and sighs. “Sorry, we have a new client who needs an epic amount of hand-holding. They’re coming by the office this morning, so I need to head in.”
Then he’s on his feet, putting on his coat, and I suddenly feel panicked. I don’t know what I had been hoping to glean from this meeting, but it was definitely more than a cup of tea and a few of his signature nonanswers.
“Do you think we can get together later this week?” I ask.
He pauses, and a strange emotion passes over his face. Not regret exactly, but something pained. Like he had hoped to escape this line of questioning.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” he says delicately.
“Oh.” I blink, trying to recover, but I have no idea what the right response is. Should I try not to look hurt? Or act like I know why? I can’t pick one, so instead I just sit there, trying to keep a neutral, easy expression on my face, while my bangs point out sideways from my head.
He pauses. “It’s not that I don’t want to, Marn. I just think it’s better if you have some space to work through all of this. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t call if you need something. Regardless of what happened between us, I still care about you.”
Then give me something, I want to say. One concrete bit of information to help make this make sense.
But I don’t. I just watch as he gets his things together, then disappears out the door, leaving me with a half-finished tea and no idea what I’m supposed to do next.
If my grandmother were here, she’d know what to do. There would be a crystal I needed to wear or a mantra to repeat. Be present and let the magic find you, she’d say. There was a time when I would have believed her, too.
But my grandmother isn’t here now. And there’s no magic I can find to save me. I have to save myself.