Page 46 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

CHAPTER NINE

Dragos

I WATCH HER sleep all night. I know this isn’t the first time I’ve done that. I know it the way that I know so many things about her. Things that she continues to dispute.

The hours pass quickly. She wakes on a gasp, and I immediately want to comfort her, but understand that I might also be the source of her fear.

“Good morning.”

“Dragos,” she says.

Yes. She’s still surprised to find herself here with me.

“I will make you coffee,” I say.

“Thank you,” she says, sitting up slowly. I’m overcome by the urge to kiss her. I was last night, too, but I could sense her pulling away from that. I understand why she didn’t want that. But I want it. I want her .

Still, I’m listening. She says that we default to the physical because talking is so difficult. But talking is especially difficult when you don’t know anything about yourself. And the things I do know she rejects.

I make my way downstairs, and marvel at the way muscle memory carries me through the motions of making coffee. The way that I am able to perform basic functions without knowing anything about myself. I don’t remember how I learned these things, and yet my body still knows them.

Like it still knows that I love Cassandra.

But what is love?

I have not asked myself that question even one time since my head injury. Instead, I’ve just been confident that the thing that I felt when I first saw her was love.

How could it be anything else?

Yes, I have felt confident in that. But what is it?

A flash and an image assault me. My mother. I know it’s my mother. Lying on the kitchen floor, looking up at the ceiling sightless. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t breathe. There is blood.

My stomach turns violently.

What is love?

I see my father, staring, without tears, without emotion, as we watch her coffin being lowered into the earth.

What is love?

The coffee finishes brewing just as I feel like I might be violently ill. And right then she comes down the stairs.

I see her, but now it feels complicated. Cluttered by this memory of my father. I can almost feel the ice radiating from him in that memory.

The lack of feeling. For me, for the woman that’s being lowered into the ground.

“Are you feeling all right?” she asks me.

“No,” I say. I have no capacity to live. I don’t know enough.

“You probably need to sleep. We should have brought someone with us…”

“We don’t know who we can trust. I don’t know what’s caused this, because I don’t know—”

I have another memory then.

I want out. Completely. I have to detach myself, my name from all of this.

Do you think it will clean the blood off of your hands?

No. The blood goes back generations. It will always be there. But it must stop.

I’m speaking to someone else in the memory. And that man is talking about blood on my hands. I look down like I might see it there.

“Dragos?”

“I have been remembering some things this morning.”

“Oh.”

“My father killed my mother. I told you that,” I say.

That pulls me away from that more recent flash of memory, back to my childhood. Back to those two things that I saw. I know that what she said is true.

“You told me that recently,” she says.

“I told you the truth. I can remember… Finding her. They say that you repress traumatic memories. Why is it that that’s the first one to return to me?”

“I don’t know,” she says. Her voice is gentle, compassionate, and that makes me feel like the situation must be dire. Because she has seemed halfway angry to have to deal with me from the first moment I can remember, so her pitying me feels like a bellwether for tragedy.

“I didn’t tell you in the beginning,” I say, trying to put all of these things in order. Trying to make sense of them.

“No. You really didn’t tell me anything about your past. I think… I didn’t much think about that because I was so young. My past… It barely existed.”

“I wouldn’t have told you,” he says. “Even if you had asked.”

“When you told me, you did it to hurt me. Not to help us get closer. You thought that it would shock me.”

“Did it?”

“Yes.”

She walks over to me, and very slowly lifts her hand, and places it on my face.

I feel instantly calm. And yet again I understand entirely what happened to me when I met her.

But looking at her right now I cannot understand what drew her to me.

I am nothing but a shell. A hollow man filled with memories of her and trauma.

Why would a young woman with so much ahead of her tie herself to me?

I put my hand over the top of hers. Scarred and tattooed, and I find it so ugly. She is so soft. So untouched by this world. I am the pain that she has experienced.

“Why did you want me?”

“I told you,” she says. But then tears fill her eyes and she turns away from me. “I’m sorry about what I said last night.”

“Which thing?”

“That what we feel for each other is common. It’s not.

If it were common then I would’ve felt it before.

If it were common then I wouldn’t have filled canvases with paintings of you.

I guess, maybe it is common, but it doesn’t make it any less powerful.

It is the thing that drives people. It’s what makes us all do things that we regret.

Things that hurt ourselves, things that hurt the other. Lust is a powerful force.”

“And that’s what’s between us?”

“I don’t think it’s only that. I’d like it to be. There is a Bible verse about love. Do you know it?”

“I did not know my own name yesterday,” I say.

“Well, I thought it was a long shot, but still. It talks about all the things that love is. Patient and kind. That isn’t us.

I struggled with that. Because I learned that verse when I was a child.

And I knew we weren’t that from the beginning.

But I thought maybe we were something that burned brighter than people who lived normal lives could ever understand.

I thought maybe we were special. And now I don’t know. ”

“We can not know together.”

I despise the fact that memory has introduced doubt. She is not wrong, though. I already know that nothing about the thing between us was patient or kind. It was greedy and insatiable.

It has been from the beginning.

She makes more coffee, and then makes a cup for me, putting cream and a very specific amount of sugar in it. I like it, and I marvel at the fact she knows this about me, and I don’t.

“You’re going to have to sleep eventually,” she says.

“I don’t need very much sleep.”

I have practiced going days at a time without sleep. I trained to be able to do that. I know it then, as certain as I know anything else.

These memories, they don’t come in a way that’s rational. It’s like I get the core first, and then the external layers begin to wrap themselves around it. A feeling, followed by an image and a reason.

We sit together at the island in the kitchen, the only sound our cups occasionally making contact on the high-gloss black countertop.

I know we didn’t have many moments like this in our marriage. Based on the things that she said. And based on feelings. Things that feel right and wrong about myself. As a husband and as a man.

We were a thunderstorm, and we never managed to reach the eye of that hurricane.

“I need to go through the things today. The room that I found, and the box. I need to remember. Because if I don’t, we cannot leave here.”

“I can,” she says.

I shake my head. “You can’t. They knew that I had come for you. They know that you can be used against me. That is the truth of it.”

“I… I don’t think that in your original state I could be used against you.”

“You could be. Believe me. I did not come after you with the intent to let you stay away from me.”

Her eyes narrow. “Did you remember something?”

“No. I feel it. I feel it burning inside of my chest. I would never have let you go. I would never have let you stay away from me.” Suddenly, the fire in my blood is too hot to control.

I reach out and wrap my hands around her wrists.

I pull her toward me. “Do you have any idea what it felt like to return and have you be gone? You were nowhere. Nowhere in the whole house, I turned everything upside down. My security said you’d gone out shopping—something you never do—but they didn’t know where you went.

I told them what fools they were for not tracking you.

And then… Then I began to find your trail.

You sold the car. I was able to trace your phone. And then I began to make a plan.”

I wasn’t conscious of remembering those things. But they’re coming out of my mouth, and I have to pause and see if they’re true. Are they memories?

Yes. I’m almost certain they are. I can see myself clearly in the house now, running barefoot up and down the halls, calling for her.

My first instinct was to be afraid. Afraid that something happened to her.

Yes. There has always been an aura of danger. A certainty that she would be taken from me.

I release my hold on her and I sit there, letting the feelings wash over me.

“What?”

“I thought they had done something to you.”

“Who?”

“I don’t… I don’t know, Cassandra. I don’t.

I only know that I… I only know that I fear for your life.

And then when I found out that you were safe I was angry.

So angry. You left the safety of my care.

I went to Paris and I was watching you. I had to keep you safe.

But then you started talking to that boy. ”

“You were watching me?”

“Yes. You’re my wife. You’re mine. You decided to leave the marriage, I did not decide to let you.”

This violence rising up inside of me…

This is what I lead with. This is the man that greets the world.

This is the one that I know. The one that makes my decisions.

The one who married Cassandra. This is the man that she knows.

This man who is so dead set in his ways, and so certain of what he wants that there is no room for discussion.