I Let Myself Forget So They Could Show Me Who They Were

The first thing I noticed when I woke up was the smell. Lilacs, not the hospital kind. Real ones, cut and arranged, sitting in a glass vase on the windowsill. I knew that vase. I had bought it at a consignment shop on Cannery Street with my own money, back when I still thought a home was something two people built together instead of something one person furnished alone. I kept my eyes closed for a count of ten and listened. Two voices, low, close together. "She's been out for six hours," Caroline said. "The doctor said she might not remember anything when she wakes up." "That would be a gift," Daniel said. "For all of us." I felt the pillow shift as someone sat on the edge of the bed. A hand closed over mine. It was warm and dry and entirely wrong, and I knew it was Caroline's because she always wore that rosemary hand cream, and the smell of it made my stomach turn. The truth was, I knew exactly who I was. My name is Iris Calloway. I am thirty-two years old. I run a commercial design studio in the old warehouse district of Calder Bay, a coastal city with more fog than money and more money than warmth. Six weeks ago I had found a receipt in Daniel's coat pocket from a jeweler in the next town over, and four days ago I had found the matching text messages he'd forgotten to delete, and two days ago I had decided to pretend I had lost my memory after the accident so that I could see what the two people I loved most would do when they thought I could not remember them. So I kept my eyes closed and let them talk. "She's stable," Caroline said. "The MRI was clean. Dr. Reyes said the memory could come back in hours or weeks. Sometimes it doesn't come back at all." "Sometimes," Daniel repeated. I could hear the smile in it. I hated that I could hear the smile in it. "We can't do this in front of her," Caroline said, but her voice had gone soft in the way it did when she was pretending to be the reasonable one. "Not yet." "When?" Daniel said. "I've been waiting a year, Caroline. A year of standing in her kitchen, eating her food, sleeping in her bed. I'm done waiting." My hand tightened around nothing under the sheet. One year. I had known Caroline since our first week of graduate school, when she had borrowed a pencil in a drafting class and never given it back. I had known Daniel for four years and been engaged to him for one. And the whole time, apparently, they had been building something behind my back. "Fine," Caroline said. "But if she wakes up and remembers everything, I'm not the one who has to explain it." "She won't," Daniel said. "And even if she does, it's done. The papers are signed. The apartment is in my name. She has nothing to come back to." I heard them stand. I heard the door click. I heard Daniel say, in a voice I had once thought was the safest sound in the world, "Let's get coffee. She'll sleep for hours." The door closed. I lay there with my heart beating so hard I could feel it in my teeth, and I did not open my eyes, because I was not done listening yet. I needed to know how deep the foundation went. Over the next two days, I learned. I learned that Caroline had been the one to file the paperwork that moved our joint savings into an account with only Daniel's name on it, because I had given her power of attorney two years ago when my mother was sick and I could not keep track of my own life. I learned that Daniel had told his parents we had broken up in January, which was why his mother had not called me since the new year. I learned that the engagement ring he had given me was a family piece, insured for forty thousand dollars, and that he had filed a claim on it eleven days ago, reporting it lost. I still had the ring. It was in my studio safe, where I had put it the night I found the texts, because even then I had known I would need a record. I learned that my business partner, Marguerite, had been told I was on indefinite leave and that Daniel was handling my accounts. Which was a lie, because Marguerite would never have agreed to that without a phone call from me. She had been my partner for six years and my friend for longer, and if she had been told that, someone had forged my voice. On the third morning, I opened my eyes for real. The room was empty. The lilacs had started to wilt. I sat up, swung my legs off the bed, and looked at the small camera I had clipped to the underside of the bedside tray the first morning I had been lucid enough to reach it, the one I had bought two months ago for the studio after a break-in, the one I had brought with me in my bag because I had known, somewhere beneath the hope, that I would need proof. I checked the footage. There they were. There was everything. I sat on the edge of the bed in my paper gown with the city gray outside the window and made a list in my head, because I have always been the kind of person who makes lists when the world falls apart. It is the only thing that keeps my hands steady. One. Do not confront them yet. They think I am a blank slate. Let them keep writing on it. Two. Get the ring out of the studio safe before Daniel does anything else with the claim. Three. Call Marguerite. Find out who forged my voice. Four. Find out how much of my life has been signed away, and by whom, and get it back. Five. Do not, under any circumstances, let them see that I remember the way Daniel said gift. The door opened. I lay back down and closed my eyes. "Iris?" Caroline's voice. Soft, tender, the voice she used for clients and elderly relatives and me. "Are you awake?" I made a small sound. I let my eyes flutter open and then widen, and then I looked at her the way you look at a stranger who has come into your room. "Where am I?" I said, and my voice cracked on purpose, because it would have cracked anyway. Caroline's face did something complicated. Relief and guilt and something else, something that looked almost like pleasure, and then it smoothed out into concern, and she took my hand. "You're in the hospital, sweetheart," she said. "You were in a car accident. But you're okay. You're safe." I looked past her to the door. Daniel stood there in his gray overcoat, holding two cups of coffee, and when he saw my eyes on him he smiled, and it was the smile he had used on me at parties when he wanted people to think he was kind. "Do you know who we are?" he asked. I looked at him for a long moment. Then I said, "No. Should I?" The two of them exchanged a glance. It was quick, less than a second, but I saw it, and I filed it away, and I held onto the cold rail of the bed with a hand that I made sure did not shake. "No," Daniel said gently. "It's okay. We'll help you remember." I nodded. I let my head fall back against the pillow. I let Caroline stroke my hair. And I thought, with a clarity that felt like cold water, that I had never in my life been so glad to be underestimated.