His Perfect Wife Was A Stranger

The first thing Nathan Cole saw when he opened his eyes was a ceiling he didn't recognize. White tiles. A flickering strip light. The smell of antiseptic thick enough to taste. "Nathan?" A woman's voice, close to his ear. He turned his head and pain shot down his neck like a struck wire. A woman was sitting beside the bed, her hand already reaching for his before he'd even blinked the room into focus. Dark hair pulled back. Eyes red-rimmed like she hadn't slept in days. He had no idea who she was. "Where..." His throat felt like sandpaper. "Where am I?" "St. Bartholomew's. You were in an accident." She squeezed his hand. "God, Nathan, you scared me half to death." He looked at their joined hands. At the thin gold band on her finger. Then at his own hand, where an identical ring sat like it had always been there. "I'm sorry," he said slowly, "who are you?" Her face didn't crumble the way he expected. It went still instead, careful, like she was choosing her next words from a very short list. "I'm Ella," she said. "I'm your wife." Nathan almost laughed. He would have, if his ribs didn't feel like they'd been stepped on by something large. He didn't have a wife. He was certain of that the way he was certain his name was Nathan Cole, that he ran Cole Holdings, that his father built the company from a single shipping contract forty years ago. Some facts didn't need checking. "That's not possible," he said. "I'd remember getting married." "You don't remember a lot of things right now." Ella's voice stayed level, but something moved behind her eyes, quick and sharp, gone before he could name it. "The doctor said memory loss after trauma like this isn't unusual. You've lost about a year." A year. He tried to reach backward through his own mind for it and found nothing but static, a door that wouldn't open no matter how hard he pushed. The last thing he remembered clearly was a board meeting. Arguing with his father about the Morrison acquisition. After that, nothing. Just this ceiling, this stranger holding his hand like she had every right to. "Show me," he said. "Prove it." Ella reached into her bag without hesitation and pulled out her phone. She unlocked it and turned the screen toward him. A photo. Him, in a suit he didn't remember buying, standing beside her on a terrace somewhere with string lights overhead. She was laughing at something off camera. He looked happy in a way that felt foreign on his own face. "There are dozens more," she said. "The wedding was small. Just us and a registrar. You wanted it that way, said you were tired of your family turning everything into a performance." That, at least, sounded like him. A nurse came in to check his vitals and Ella stepped back from the bed, giving her room, but Nathan noticed the way her eyes tracked the nurse's every movement, cataloguing, alert. Not the behaviour of an exhausted wife. The behaviour of someone watching for a threat. "Mr. Cole, you're a very lucky man," the nurse said, checking the monitor. "Head trauma like that, the swelling could have gone a very different way." "What happened to me exactly?" "Car accident. Single vehicle, we're told. You went off the road on the A40." The nurse made a note on her chart. "Your wife's been here every day. Barely left your side." When the nurse left, Nathan turned back to Ella. "Single vehicle. I went off the road on my own." "That's what the police report says." "You don't believe it." Something flickered across her face again, faster this time. She glanced at the door before she answered, and the gesture told him more than any words could have. "I think," she said quietly, "we should talk about this somewhere that isn't a hospital room with the door open." "Ella." He said her name like he was testing the shape of it in his mouth. "Why do I feel like you're afraid of something?" She was quiet for a long moment. Long enough that he thought she wouldn't answer at all. "Because I am," she said finally. "And so should you be." Before he could ask what she meant, his phone buzzed on the nightstand, the screen lighting up with a name he did recognize immediately, easily, the way he recognized his own reflection. Dad. He reached for it out of instinct, and Ella's hand shot out and covered his before he could pick it up. "Don't," she said. "It's my father." "I know exactly who it is." Her grip on his wrist tightened. "Nathan, listen to me. Whatever you remember or don't remember right now, there's something you need to understand before you talk to anyone from your family. Before you talk to your father, before you talk to Daniel, before you talk to Julian." "What are you talking about?" Ella glanced at the door one more time, then leaned in close enough that her next words came out as barely more than breath. The accident wasn't an accident. And if you start remembering the wrong things out loud, in front of the wrong people, they won't wait for a second crash to finish the job." The phone kept buzzing between them, his father's name glowing on the screen like a countdown. Nathan didn't pick it up.