When I Lost You: A Gripping, Heart Breaking Novel of Lost Love. (20 page)

I
t’s
Sunday and it’s raining outside – a steady drizzle that makes me very glad that I don’t need to leave the warmth of the house until later in the afternoon – Leo and I are going to have dinner together at the rehab clinic.

Before I go downstairs I dig out our wedding album from the top of the wardrobe in our bedroom, and I cradle it against my chest as I walk.

I take a seat at the couch and rest the album on my lap. The couple who stare back at me from the cover feel like old friends that I have long since lost touch with.
I wonder where they ended up
,
I could ask, and Leo would smile at me and respond with a reassuring,
They were so in love, I’m sure wherever they are, they’re happy.

Before I have time to look further, I hear a sound at the back door. I push the album on the shelf under the coffee table and leap to my feet, smoothing a hand over my fringe as I run towards it. I assume it’s Mrs Wilkins, but she always calls out so as not to startle me.

‘Hello?’ I call uncertainly as I approach.

‘It’s me,’ Leo replies. I unlock the back door and he smiles at me. The driver is standing beside him, holding an umbrella over his head. ‘Hello, love.’

‘What are you doing here?’ I ask him, scanning his face for signs of anger or pain – has his memory returned?

He smiles quizzically, and he gestures towards the door. ‘Can I come in?’ I hastily move out of the way. ‘What are you up to?’ Leo asks, when he has said his goodbyes to the driver and we are in the kitchen.

‘I only just got out of bed. I was just about to make a coffee; do you want one?’

‘That sounds great.’

‘I thought you were resting this morning too? Weren’t we just doing dinner?’

‘I missed you,’ he says, and I glance at him. He’s staring at me intently. ‘I was trying to reminisce but I kept running into blank space, so I thought I’d come and see you.’

‘What were you reminiscing about?’

‘I
think
I remember a lot of the months when we were dating. I actually remember now when you started the Foundation, and how hard you worked in those first few months. I remember being worried about you.’

‘
You
worried about
me
working too hard?’ I laugh a little. ‘Good thing you don’t know my husband then.’ He smiles at my silly joke. ‘So what was it you were trying to figure out?’ I prompt, while I prepare the coffee.

‘I can’t remember how we went from “dating” to “engaged”. Did I propose to you? How?’

Marry me
, he’d whispered. Rain had been pelting down around us, and the adoration in his gaze and the reverence with which he’d whispered those words would have convinced me even if I had been at all uncertain. I glance at the window; lines of water are running down the glass in rivulets towards the ground. Suddenly I realise why Leo is here unannounced, and why I went for the wedding album this morning… He proposed on a day just like this one.

‘Go through to the dining room,’ I suggest quietly. ‘I’ll show you a photo.’

I collect the coffees and follow Leo. He is staring up at the wall of images.

‘Do you know which one it is?’ I ask him as I slide the coffee in front of him.

‘Thanks,’ he murmurs, and he shakes his head, confusion distorting his features. I point to a photo on the bottom corner. We are both soaked to the bone, our hair plastered to our foreheads, my make-up has run all the way down to my chin. We are smiling so hard that it hurts my heart just to look at it.

‘Why are we wet?’

‘I
was
working very hard.’ I sit down beside him. ‘But you didn’t tell me you were worried about me. The Foundation had just bought the land for the Centre, and I had just hired Tobias and we were trying to pull together the plans for the buildings so that we could start looking for corporate sponsorship. You rang me one Friday afternoon and told me I needed to leave work early, but you wouldn’t tell me why.’

‘How mysterious and romantic of me.’

‘Indeed. Well, we went straight to the airport, and you had booked two economy class tickets to Yulara.’ He raises an eyebrow at me, and I laugh. ‘I’d never flown economy class before. I didn’t say anything to you at the time, but I was mortified.’

‘Poor me,’ Leo protests. ‘That sounds like such a sweet gesture. I was taking you to Uluru?’

‘We’d had a few conversations about it. You told me it was the spiritual heart of Australia and that it was negligent of me to have never visited.’

‘That does sound like something I’d say.’

‘Yep… So we flew in those cramped seats all the way to Central Australia and we stayed in the hotel there, and the next morning you woke me up at four in the morning so we could go and watch the sunrise over the rock. Does any of this ring any bells?’

‘Not yet. But keep talking.’

‘And the sunrise… it was breathtaking,’ I murmur. ‘The way the colours of the rock changed as the light hit it… It was an amazing experience. Later in the day, clouds came over, but we’d booked to do a walking tour around the base and you were pretty insistent that a bit of rain wasn’t going to stop us.’

‘We walked off from the tour, didn’t we?’

I glance at him and smile. ‘Yeah, you convinced me to break off and try to get all the way around before the rain started.’

‘Was I trying to get you alone to propose? I don’t remember that.’

‘I think you were just trying to get me far enough along the walking track that I couldn’t insist we turn back if it started to rain,’ I laugh.

‘So…’

‘We started walking, and it was
so
beautiful. I was so happy, and so – content.’

‘That’s right… It was peaceful, wasn’t it?’

‘It really was. Until…’

‘There was a crack of thunder.’ Leo says slowly. Our gazes lock, and the atmosphere between us is as electric as the earth’s had been the day of that storm.

‘The rain clouds were obvious,’ I whisper. ‘But we didn’t realise it was going to storm. The thunder started, and then lightning, and it didn’t just start to sprinkle rain – it
poured
.’

We’d been drenched in seconds – not just by the rain, but by the instant waterfall that the sides of Uluru had become. Water was coming at us from every direction and the wind picked up too. It was hard even to keep our eyes open. Leo took my hand and made me run. So there we were, running along the track – red mud splashing up my calves – and shivering from the cold but laughing hysterically because – well, what else was there to do?

‘I was going to shelter you in a cave,’ Leo says softly. ‘I remembered it from the first time I visited.’

‘But you didn’t realise it was much further ahead, and after a few minutes running, I started to complain.’
Leo, this is ridiculous! Are you sure this cave even exists?

I’d been out of breath from the sprint I had to maintain to keep up with Leo, but still somehow, laughing. The joy of the adventure with him was brighter than the cold discomfort of the rain; more invigorating even than the adrenaline that surged through my body with each clap of painfully loud thunder.

‘I remember now,’ Leo says suddenly. ‘I stopped to scoop you up into my arms, and I looked down at you and you looked like a drenched cat. But – you were still beautiful.’

‘Oh,
please
!’ I roll my eyes at him. ‘I was a mess. But you
did
pick me up, and you stopped running and then while you were standing right there while the rain poured down all over us and the thunder raged
above us, you just said…’

‘
Marry me
,’ he whispers, just like he had the first time. My heart leaps, and I realise with some shock that even if he proposed again right now – even knowing all of the heartache that would follow – I would
still
say yes in an instant.

‘I didn’t hear you the first time you said it. The rain was too loud.’

‘Which was actually great,’ Leo says softly, and he laughs. ‘Because I’d said it without thinking. So when you shouted “What!”, I stopped, and asked myself if this was really what I wanted – and every single thing within me shouted
yes
! So I asked you again…’

I stare at him. ‘You never told me that. I kind of figured it was impulsive; I didn’t realise just how impulsive it was!’

‘That’s a
really
shitty proposal story,’ Leo grimaces, and I laugh.

‘I thought you’d lost your mind,’ I grin at him. ‘And yes, I think it possibly was the worst proposal ever.’

‘At least this explains why I can’t remember thinking about asking you,’ he says, and he smiles to himself, as if satisfied by this realisation. ‘I
didn’t
think about it. It was pure instinct – it just felt so right.’

‘So then we found the cave and finally got out of the rain, and you took that photo on your phone.’ I gestured towards the wall. ‘I was amazed that the phone still worked because it was drenched. We thought it was a good omen.’

‘And then I dropped it as we walked back to the bus and the screen shattered,’ Leo says, and he groans. ‘Oh, God! What a disaster.’

‘When we were walking back after the storm passed, and I complained about my wet clothes and how tired I was, you kept trying to convince me it was romantic,’ I tease him lightly.

‘Did I do something more romantic at some point to make up for that?’

‘Not then, but you did surprise me with your grandmother’s ring a few days later; and if I wasn’t already madly in love with you,
that
would have done it.’

I raise my hand, and stare down at the solitaire above my wedding band. He’d walked into my apartment one evening and dropped onto one knee, and then wordlessly slipped the ring onto my finger. Later, he admitted that he’d stolen one of my other rings to get the size right, and he’d had to bully the jeweller into replacing the cracked stone overnight because he felt so bad he hadn’t been better prepared.

‘And we lived happily ever after?’ Leo says now. I look back to him and swallow.

‘Not exactly “happily ever after”. The hero isn’t supposed to lose his memory halfway through the story.’

‘What if the hero losing his memory is the
start
to our story?’ Leo asks me very quietly.

‘You don’t remember anything that happened between us, Leo.’

‘All that I know is that I love you. If our life together has been disappointing to you, then I’m going to find a way to make it right.’

‘I love you too,’ I say unevenly. ‘But you can’t make promises like that to me.’

‘Yes, I can,’ he says simply.

‘There’s so much water under the bridge,’ I whisper, and I feel rising panic because I know that I have to tell him now and it’s going to break my heart. I raise my eyes to him, and see the love for me, right there, where I could almost reach out and touch it. ‘Things between us aren’t like you remember now, Leo.’

‘What
is
it like, love?’

All of a sudden the panic inside me recedes and I accept my fate. Calmness settles over me. It is time to end this trip down memory lane once and for all. I can’t prolong this anymore, leaving it even another hour will hurt us both too much. Leo waits patiently while I collect my thoughts, and then I take a deep breath, and I whisper, ‘Leo, I’m pregnant.’

A
s soon as
Molly says those words, I know that something is wrong.

I feel it in my body – a shiver of annoyance that does not at all match the words she is saying. And she is clearly anxious too – I can see her shaking. At first, I am too distracted by the sensation of displeasure to really absorb the meaning of her words – all I know is that, for some reason I can’t identify, I don’t like this news.

‘Is this a good thing?’ I ask her eventually. A tear runs down Molly’s cheek and I automatically shift myself around the table to give her an awkward hug. I reflect on the tear-drenched weeks we’ve shared since we came back to Sydney. This emotional Molly does not at all match up to the memories I have recovered, something I’d not really considered until now… or perhaps I’d just put it down to the stress she’d been under since my accident. Now though the hormonal cluster bomb of pregnancy makes perfect sense, and I lean a little so that I can survey the shape of her body beneath her pyjamas. Molly’s whole shape has changed from the memories I have of her – she has gained a little weight, and she is much curvier.

‘We only found out a few weeks before your accident,’ she whispers. She seems incredibly tense and I can tell she is still reluctant to talk to me about it, although I can’t understand why. ‘I haven’t had time to even think about it. And I didn’t know when to tell you – I didn’t want to put any pressure on you…’

A baby. I try to understand what this is going to mean for me: I am going to be a
father
. On some level, I’ve always wanted children – I just hadn’t expected to settle down well enough to have them. And with Molly? God, how could I possibly be disappointed – she’s remarkable. So why do I feel so uncomfortable?

‘Are
you
not happy about this, Molly?’

‘With everything else that’s been going on, I’ve just had to shelve it all for a bit. But you’re doing so well, and I think I have to have an ultrasound this week… I’m going to start showing soon and I just can’t put off dealing with this anymore.’

The shiver of displeasure is growing, not abating. I consider it curiously, studying the feeling as if it’s something detached from me; simply a puzzle I need to figure out.

‘How did I feel about it?’ I ask her gently. Molly shakes her head. I think for a minute that she’s not going to answer the question, then she says, ‘It took some getting used to.’

‘Was it an…’ I almost say the word ‘accident’ when I realise how negative it sounds and so I correct myself, ‘a surprise? Is that what you mean?’

She nods, but she’s turned away from me now and I can’t see her face, and the confused disappointment in my gut isn’t shifting or fading. I force myself to stop thinking about the pregnancy so that I can start thinking about what it will actually mean: a baby, a child.

And I hate it that one of my very first thoughts is about how much more difficult it’s going to be to leave when I need to go back to work. I don’t dare consider what Molly would say if she knew what I was thinking.

‘How many kids do we want?’

‘We hadn’t decided,’ she whispers back. ‘You wanted lots, maybe a few of ours… maybe some foster children too. Are you upset that I didn’t tell you until now?’

‘Hell, if you’d told me on that first day, I think I might have gone right back into the coma.’

She doesn’t laugh. Instead, she turns back towards me and stares right into my eyes. ‘Are you
sure
you’re okay?’

‘Is this why you’ve been…’ I struggle to put into words the concern that I’ve not been able to shake. I have memories of us now – all the way up to our engagement, and I now remember a tremendous closeness with Molly that I’ve not felt since my memory has started to return.

It is as if I’ve reminded her of that fact with my question. She is a little slumped, leaning over the table as if the admission has drained the strength from her. Now though, she straightens and she turns back to face me fully, and I see fight in her eyes.

‘There’s more, Leo,’ she says. ‘I just – I don’t know how to tell you the rest. I should have told you already, but it was…’

‘It’s okay, love,’ I say gently, because she’s in pain and although I am a little nervous about what more there could be, my first instinct is to calm her. ‘You can tell me now.’

‘You have to promise me you will try to understand, Leo. I only hid this from you because I didn’t know how to tell you. I
have
tried to tell you several times, but…’

‘Molly,’ I whisper very slowly as I brush her fringe out of her eyes. I’m trying very hard to ignore the rising sense of dread as I reassure her, ‘Whatever it is, I can handle it, okay?’

‘We separated, Leo… You filed for divorce,’ she whispers.

‘We couldn’t have,’ I say instantly, and I pull away from her to stare at her – a hard stare, a questioning stare, because she is speaking utter nonsense. ‘Especially if there was a baby. We just couldn’t have.’ There are tears in Molly’s eyes now, and I am bewildered. I have just recovered the magnificent memory of her accepting my proposal. The world was
our oyster five minutes ago – now she’s trying to tell me that we let that slip away? It is simply impossible.

‘It’s not like
this
anymore, Leo.’

‘What does that even mean?’ I’m growing impatient. I have been frustrated ever since I woke up, but this is a different kind of frustration. It’s an immense and overwhelming sensation, like being completely lost all over again just as I was beginning to feel I could understand my life, because I knew with absolute certainty that the central point of it was
her
.

I cannot imagine any scenario where I would allow us to be pulled apart. And she has said that
I
filed for divorce? I can’t accept that; I
won’t
accept it.

‘Molly,’ I say, and I force myself to speak calmly and clearly, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘That last year… has been really tough,’ she whispers unevenly. ‘We fought so much. It just wasn’t working, Leo.’

‘I would never have stopped trying, I just wouldn’t have,’ I say, almost to myself. I draw in a deep breath and hold it, as if fortifying myself for battle. ‘Well, if that’s true, then I am glad I had this accident because clearly I had lost my mind.’

The gaps in my memory are still extensive but I am undeterred – I am still
certain of the love I have for her. Whatever happened between us, I refuse to entertain the idea that I cannot trust that love.

Molly stares at me. ‘Leo,’ she says, frowning, ‘What are you saying?’

‘If this is true, we have to fix it.’

‘You can’t possibly know that you want that.’

‘The only thing I know is that I love you, and I know that you love me too. Surely everything else is just noise?’

‘I might have said that too – once,’ Molly murmurs, ‘Back when you proposed, I remember thinking that life might be hard for us sometimes, but we’d always have each other. It just isn’t that simple.’

‘I’m afraid you are going to have to convince me of that, Molly,’ I say and I shake my head, but then a new thought strikes me – the one thing that
could
change everything. I lean away from her a little, and ask hesitantly, ‘Do you still love me?’

‘I told you I do five minutes ago. I will
always
love you, Leo.’

‘Then has it really become so bad that you would give up on us?’

‘Can you remember any of it?’ she asks me, her voice a bare whisper. ‘Is any of this ringing any bells?’ With some difficulty I drag my gaze away from her to stare at the polished floorboards. I concentrate as hard as I can, but succeed only in giving myself a headache. My every heartbeat triggers pain in my skull, and but for the fact that this is such a huge mess, I might have tried to put a pause on the conversation. But this did not seem like the kind of thing I could just walk away from and resume later after some painkillers.

‘I can’t imagine a time when you weren’t a revelation to me,’ I say, when my memory remains stubbornly blank. I think that the most recent memory I now hold is the proposal. We’d had squabbles when we were dating – every couple does – but the good times by far outweighed the bad. ‘I can’t even conceptualise how bad things must have been for me to walk away from you.’

‘But you
were
walking away from me even when we were dating,’ she says, and there’s a barely restrained anger to her words. ‘Every time you left for the field, every juicy story that you flew out to write,
that
was the start of where we wound up.’

‘Are you trying to tell me that this was entirely
my
fault?’ And although I’m telling her the truth and I do not remember a single thing of this, I know
this defensiveness. I might not remember the incidents, but the urge to come back at her is strong – I have clearly done this a million times.

Is that what this came down to – did she try to force me to leave a job that I loved, and did I choose it over her? I find it hard to believe she would ever make me choose – but I also cannot be sure of what choice I would have made if she had.

‘Being married is a lot harder than we thought it was going to be,’ Molly murmurs.

‘You mean it’s a lot harder to be married to
me
than you thought it would be?’ I say. I truly want nothing more than to sort this out right now and earn back the sparkling affection in her eyes but I’m still defensive, and as she recognises that I see Molly’s eyes cloud over.

‘We both made mistakes.’

‘Do you
want
to fix things?’

‘I don’t know,’ she admits, and my heart sinks. ‘Since you woke up, I have had glimpses of the way it used to be. If we could be like that… If that is still who we are, then of course I want that.’

‘But…’ I can hear the word, even though she hasn’t said it.

‘But, Leo,’ she gives me a pleading and watery smile then shakes her head, ‘
you
don’t want this. As soon as your memory comes back, as soon as your legs are working again, all you are going to want to do is go back to work. And as soon as you go back into the field, we will be right back where we started.’

‘Love, I can see that at least part of the problem was how much I’d been working. Obviously I’m going to be here, in Sydney, not working… for a while anyway. Do you think we could really focus on
us
while I’m here recovering? I
want
us to work, Molly. Can we work at this together?’

‘So what does that look like?’ She raises her eyebrows at me in a gentle challenge. ‘How do you propose we “work at this”?’

‘We
talk
,’ I say, and when she grimaces, I ask hesitantly, ‘You don’t think that would work?’

She smiles sadly at me. ‘I have no idea – we’ve never really tried it. We seemed to skip straight to yelling.’

I draw in a deep breath. ‘So from today, we do things differently – we don’t yell, we talk instead.’ I exhale, and I offer her what I hope is a reassuring smile. ‘We can fix this; I
know
we can.’

‘You are so innocent without your memories, Leo,’ she whispers.

And
she
seems so jaded. I hate it, and I hate knowing that I probably caused it. ‘Is that a bad thing?’ I ask her. ‘Do you think I’m being naive?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I just… I really don’t know if I can go through all of this again, Leo, not if we’re going to wind up right back here.’

‘We won’t, I
promise
.’ I release her gently, then run my hands over the stubble on my head as I exhale. ‘God, this is not what I was expecting when I came over here today.’

‘I’m so sorry, Leo,’ she sighs.

I take her hand and hold it tightly between mine. I consider the softness of her skin against my fingers, and the burning fire of the way that I love her. Perhaps there is hard work ahead of us, perhaps there is a mess behind us that I cannot see yet, but I am not afraid of a fight – and I’m certain that if there is one thing in my life worth fighting for it’s Molly.