Page 42 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

CHAPTER SEVEN

Dragos

S HE’S CRYING. S HE’S TRYING not to let me see, but my Cassandra is crying, her back to me, the shattered pieces of that black vase around her feet. It’s late and my head hurts, but I know I can’t sleep. I wouldn’t want to even if I could, not when faced with her pain like this.

What manner of bastard am I?

That’s the question I’m most obsessed with answering.

My wife left me. She ran from me.

She’s here with me, weeping, yelling. I can see how much I hurt her, and I have no idea what I did.

I’m certain I didn’t have an affair. I cannot imagine ever wanting to touch another woman. She makes me ache. Even in my present state, my desire for her is intense. Nearly all-consuming.

Even without memories, with an injury, my need for her feels like the most essential thing.

“I am sorry,” I say. “I’m not a good husband, clearly.”

“No, you aren’t,” she says, her voice watery.

“Why did you marry me?”

Her shoulders sag and she turns to face me. “I didn’t know better. I thought that our attraction was everything. I thought it was enough. I thought it was what made us…us. And my family couldn’t tell me I was being silly, even though I think my mom wanted to.”

“Tell me,” I say. “Tell me how we…met.”

“I was working at an event.”

She has mentioned that before, but it doesn’t feel right to me. She tells me again, though. She was wearing black, waiting tables. I approached her and took the tray from her.

No. I didn’t approach her.

I close my eyes. She’s sitting in Trafalgar Square, on the edge of the fountain and she’s wearing a bright yellow dress.

Her long legs are stretched out in front of her, as one of her friends tells her a joke.

Then a man—a boy really—sitting to her left leans in toward her and I fantasize about killing him.

I remember the fantasy. Vividly.

It makes me think I’ve seen someone struck in that manner before, it’s so vivid, and I know at the time I felt no remorse for wishing death on him. I’m not sure I feel any remorse now.

But she’s moved on in the story, to me taking her home.

“I thought that you’d send me away that night but you didn’t. Then I thought you were being nice because I was a virgin.” She blushes just slightly when she says that. I feel a deep sense of possessiveness, knowing I was her first, and I don’t think that was the point of the story.

She clears her throat. “You let me stay, and then you took me shopping. You took me to Trafalgar Square.”

It’s so odd that she says that considering my memory and I wonder if somehow my mind has put two different events together.

“And then?” I ask, desperate for more.

“You took me back to your place again. I had to text my roommate and tell her. I mean, if I’m honest I texted her and bragged because she was also a virgin and we’d both sort of started despairing of ever seeing a naked penis.”

She laughs ruefully, but I’m only filled with curiosity. “Why hadn’t you?”

“What?”

“Why had you not been with a man? It isn’t because you aren’t appealing.”

“I was too busy.”

“You were busy the night you met me, according to you, and yet you made time for sex. So why not before?”

She looks away from me. “It was love at first sight for me, I fear.” She blinks.

“Not really. You can’t love someone on sight, that’s all chemicals and pheromones and all of that, but it felt like it at the time.

It felt like something bigger than myself and I…

I wanted that.” She pauses for a moment.

“You’ve never asked me about this before. ”

“I haven’t?”

“No. I’ve told you some of this, I’m sure, but you never really asked. When we first got together I chattered at you constantly, and I think you found it amusing but…you weren’t really asking for my life story. When you met my parents—”

“When was that?”

“After we got engaged. When you met them, I think you were completely bemused to find yourself in such a domestic situation.”

“Why?” I ask the question with a burning sense of frustration inside me.

“You didn’t have a good childhood.”

“You said you didn’t know anything about me.”

She looks the other way. “Right before I left you, you told me that you saw your father die. And you also told me… You said that you found your mother’s body in the kitchen when you were a child.

And that you’re certain your father had killed her.

When I took you to meet my parents I didn’t know any of that.

In hindsight I can understand why my life confounded you. ”

I sit with that information and I try to assemble it into something I recognize. But I can’t picture myself as a boy, much less imagine my parents. What sort of house did we live in? Was it in Romania? In the country or the city? Did I love my mother?

Did I love my father?

I can’t see anything but Cassandra. She is every memory, and suddenly more than just the one. I see her in the yellow dress, I see her in the black and I feel a great sense of achievement and satisfaction as I cross the room and take a tray of champagne out of her hands.

I see her on the couch, I wrap my hand around her throat and my body responds to this image. I remember her painting then.

“We liked it rough, didn’t we?”

She nearly chokes on a laugh. “We did. It’s the one place we always agreed and everyone was happy.”

Why did I fail her so profoundly emotionally then? Why was I such a bad husband to her?

“What?” she asks, sounding irritated.

“I’m thinking,” I say.

I can’t be in the dark about who I am. It’s an issue of safety, first and foremost for Cassandra. But I also feel compelled to look at the records of who I was as a man, so that I can fashion myself into a different one. One who can be with her. One who can have her.

Love her.

“I love you,” I say, because it is the only truth I know and right then it’s brighter than any image in my head. Right then, it is the only thing I know for sure.

She goes white, the color draining from her cheeks, her whole body going rigid. “You don’t.”

“I do. I woke up knowing nothing but your face. It’s the only memory I have now.

I see it, the night we met at the gala. I went straight to you.

I knew I wanted you and no one else. I knew I had to have you.

” I don’t remember the words I was thinking, or what my plan was.

What I’m experiencing is the echo of the feeling.

The certainty that I needed her more than anything or anyone. That I would give up my life for her if it was required.

But you didn’t. If you had done that she wouldn’t have left you.

True. It was true. And yet, I’d had my life stripped from me. My memory of who I was. She is all that remains and I will not make the same mistake again.

I won’t lose her to hold onto something that I can live without. I’ve been given a gift, I think. Everything unnecessary was taken from me. Cassandra is what remains.

I was clearly a foolish man who thought that other things mattered more than my wife, but I cannot argue with this thing fate has given both of us.

“Let’s walk through the reality of the situation,” she says, her voice caustic.

“I told you I loved you and that I needed more from you and you wouldn’t give it.

No, I don’t think you believed I’d leave you but that’s because I was such a sucker for you and you were so egotistical it never occurred to you that someone would defy you in that way. ”

“I can’t know that, so what you’re doing is writing a one-sided narrative that I have no ability to rebut.”

“Well, Dragos, you didn’t do anything to fight that narrative when you knew the truth either. You let me sit with my own presuppositions and you did nothing to tell me about you, who you were, what you felt. And then you followed me to Paris.”

“Because I needed you.”

“Or because you lost, and you hate to lose.”

I reject that. Wholly. “Or because I couldn’t live without you.”

“Do you know what I think? I think you’re desperate for this to be true because for some reason I’m the only thing you have to hold onto.

And maybe, for some reason, this version of yourself wants to believe you contain some sort of basic human decency or a modicum of emotion, but let me tell you something, Dragos, when you remember everything, you don’t care about that.

You don’t care about being a good man. A good husband. ”

She shakes her head. “I can’t do this. I can’t.” Then she leaves me standing there in the room with nothing but the shattered vase.

I don’t know the layout of my own house.

I don’t know where to go or what to do but I find myself walking through the house as if some GPS coordinates were entered into my body without me knowing it.

I arrive at a door and I expect to open it and find a bedroom, but when I push it open that’s not what I find.

Don’t you ever get tired of black?

I recall that as I step inside and look at another severe room, totally absent any color.

I walk to the desk, a large, horseshoe shape with columns of drawers, and I sit in the plush leather chair positioned there.

The computer sees my face and wakes up. I sit there, staring at the screen, and then my left hand goes to the third drawer from the top just beside me. I open it, and inside there’s a key.

I sit there staring at it. I know something then, even though I’m not sure how. It’s muscle memory that guided me to the key, and that sees my hand picking it up now.

I don’t keep anything important on computers. Anything can be hacked. I know that with a certainty that defies logic.

There is a door at the back of the room and it has a keyhole in the doorknob. I stick the key in and it fits. But the key doesn’t unlock the door; rather it ignites a light up at the top that shines into my eye, and only then does the door give.

I open the door, and behind it is a keypad. I don’t think. I simply enter numbers that mean nothing to me but that follow a pattern my hands seem to know, and then another door gives.

And behind that door is a room filled with files.

I feel a deep sense of foreboding as I walk inside. And I’m not certain why. Something Cassandra said echoes inside me. I didn’t care then if I was a good man.

Why do I care now?

I have been dropped into a life, some thirty years into living it, with no knowledge of good or evil. She is my compass. And the arrow pointing to her is demanding that I be someone worthy of her, and I know…

Deep down I fear I’m not.

And that the proof of that may lie here.

The file cabinets pertain to business, I’m certain of that. But there is a box in the corner that isn’t the same. Not a neat file cabinet, but a box that looks like it came from a moving truck.

I make my way to it, and I pick it up. It’s heavy.

I need to go through all of these things. I need to try and piece myself together. But I decide that I need to do it with Cassandra.

Because I knew what sort of man I was when I first met her, and I saw a reason to hide it.

My instinct now is to continue to hide except…

I already know how that film ends. I don’t like that ending. It ends with her leaving. It ends with me chasing her to Paris and her doing mad paintings in her garret, missing me and hating me all at once.

Even without the bullet and the head wound, this isn’t the ending I want.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

I think she said that to me once. I hear it in her voice.

I might be insane, that’s the trouble. I don’t know. But I am capable of making a choice right now, and with that agency I’m determined to not simply walk in these same footsteps I walked in before.

I carry the box out of the office and I try and trust my feet to carry me to where I think she might be, but this time I do find a bedroom and she isn’t in it. It’s clearly mine, but there is a door inside, and when I open it, it takes me to another bedroom.

“Cassandra?”

She comes out of the bathroom wearing a white robe, looking like the fulfilment of every fantasy I can’t remember.

“I told you, I can’t do this with you. I’m exhausted. I know you don’t remember what happened, I know you remember me, but believe me when I tell you that you don’t want me.”

“I do.”

“You don’t. You have always had a fantasy in your head.

The woman you think I am, the woman you want me to be, and I didn’t do anything to disrupt that for a long time.

I just…let myself love you like a fool, but I was foolish because I never knew you and you can’t love someone you don’t know.

What we had was lust, insane chemistry. I was young enough and naive enough to think that was all I needed.

And yes, the amazing trips, the money, the gifts, all of that made the fantasy that much more compelling, but it wasn’t the real you and it wasn’t the real me.

When we had to actually live life together it became abundantly clear. ”

I can’t argue with her because she remembers, and I don’t.

“Then let’s get to know each other now. I do not know you and I do not know me.

We can find out who I am together. I think I’ve found my secrets,” I say as I set the box down on her bed.

“And there are more. I am willing to do all of this with you. With no protection. I will not filter it, and I will have no lies I can tell you because I will be seeing all of it for the first time. Get to know me, Cassandra, as I do. And then decide if you can love me or not.” I make my way to her and I put my hand on her face.

“For my part, I know already that I love you. All this will do is make me more certain.”

She looks away from me, but not before I see tears in her eyes.

“If this is what we need to do to put the whole thing to rest then yes, I’ll do this with you.

” She takes in a deep, shuddering breath.

“I tried to just hate you. I tried to leave. I tried to paint you out of my dreams and it didn’t work.

So yes, I’ll do this with you. But it’s a postmortem for me, Dragos.

I need you to understand that. I already know that what we were…

is dead and gone, and there’s nothing we can do to bring it back. ”