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4

ASHER

D elilah is inconsolable as I pick her up. She shakes against me, and I look down, seeing the tab open. The corner is fucked, and the broken pixels eat up the screen. But the name of her search is visible. Carol’s Diner.

She’s hellbent on accepting what she thinks are her memories, making this all ten times harder than it needs to be. But she clings to me and hugs me. She smells like mine, the same way she always did after sleeping in my bed all night, and there’s no hesitance as she wraps her legs around my waist. Her arms go around my neck and my strong wife breaks.

Her tears slip against my neck and make her whispers stutter. “It’s real. Asher’s real. This is real.”

I knew she’d break down, but I thought it would come later and that it would be hidden from me given her need to keep everything to herself. That she would rage and call me a liar, fight, or argue. But she’s accepting it sooner than I anticipated, given her history, and I rest my cheek on her temple as I carry her out of the bathroom. Her golden strands stick to her tear-stricken face, but they don’t slow her despair.

The feeling of her in my arms can’t be replicated and it only gets better as she strokes up my nape. I have her back and nostalgia is a perfect comfort. She’s always been strong. So strong that it used to fuck with me, and everyone thought she was a bitch growing up because of it. But the broken version is no less beautiful.

I lean back against the sofa, careful not to squash her legs when she doesn’t unwrap them from me. There’s nothing I can do until her tears stop, so I wait. They slowly taper off and her entire body sags against me without any energy.

“I had a job,” she whispers while staring at the wall, unblinking.

Stroking her hair back, I tilt my head into her line of vision and speak softly around the fractured pieces of my wife.

“Do you remember the hospital stay after Kane died?”

Her eyes fill with tears at the mention of him. Grief. It’s the only emotion on her face, like every other time she hears his name. But she nods, and I ignore the way her grief over him causes a storm inside my mind.

“You left school?—”

“Yeah, I remember. They wouldn’t let me leave the hospital”—she rubs her wrist—“and I was there for years.”

I take a controlled breath as she shifts so her legs aren’t behind me. She doesn’t leave my lap and twists to sit on my thigh sideways with her head on my shoulder.

Is she thinking about him when she looks at me?

We have the same face because we were identical, but I have no idea who Delilah sees when she looks at me.

Whether it’s me or him. Me or my brother, who she killed.

“The doctors always tell me not to explain this to you,” I say. “They think it will just confuse you, but I know you. You need to know everything, or you’ll start getting pissed.”

My lips lift into a small smile at the memories of Delilah’s outburst. Her rage and jealousy used to be a turn on. Thirteen years later and it hasn’t changed on my part. Some days, those memories are all that’s keeping me sane.

Tracing her brow with my thumb, I continue as my voice drops to a whisper. “Whenever you have these episodes, regress or whatever the medical term is, you’ll wake up with reality altered. You’ll call a diner in Connecticut and ask to speak to Carol. There’s no one there with that name. The last time you were on the phone for over an hour with a woman called Eve. She listened to you and promised she’d find out if there was a customer with that name.”

Her eyes narrow and she looks away from me as she mumbles to herself, “Eve? The woman’s name is Eve. I spoke to her.”

I nod and press my lips to her hairline as I soften my voice further. “Yeah, baby. And you’ll think that I died, that Kane is locked up. None of that is true, Lilo, it’s just your mind playing tricks on you.”

Taking my phone out, I show her the album specifically created to help her and has proof of a life together. Her breathing slows as I show her the photo from London. She’s twenty-two in it and smiling from ear to ear.

“This was after you left the hospital. You wanted to do all the tourist activities. But then you got bored, and we ditched the plan to explore instead.” I flick to the next picture showing both of us in Bath under the short-lived British sun. “You said it was a peaceful city and you loved the Roman ruins.”

More tears slip over her bottom lashes and slowly race down her cheek. Her usually vibrant blue eyes are clouded by red veins sprawling through the whites. She doesn’t wipe the tears away as they drip from her jawline. She just lets them be. My beautiful strong wife cries so softly that she doesn’t move. Her entire body is frozen, other than the tears falling.

I don’t know how long she spent locked in the bathroom, but it’s already dusk, and I watch her against the dying sun without turning on any other lights.

Her sadness is like art. So haunting and beautiful like those splintered fragments of her mind are giving her deeper facets with each drip against her hands that are limply on her thighs.

Cupping the back of her head, I lean forward and kiss her crown. My lips don’t move from the strands with my low promise.

“It’s okay. You’ll get better again.”