After My Husband Faked My Death for His Mistress

I don't remember much about those forty-eight hours.

I remember a hospital room. White ceiling. The smell of antiseptic and something floral — carnations, maybe, from a vase I never saw. I remember Koen's voice, low and steady, speaking to someone in the hallway while I lay there staring at the ceiling tiles and counting them because counting was the only thing my brain could do.

I remember signing something. A form, maybe. My hand moved but I wasn't in it.

I remember Dr. Holt. Older man, kind eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. He spoke to me once, briefly, and his voice had the particular gentleness of someone delivering a mercy. He didn't explain what he was doing. He didn't need to. I understood it the way you understand things in a dream — not with your mind, but somewhere deeper.

Koen handled everything else.

I don't know how. I didn't ask. There are things you accept when you have nothing left to question with.

---

At 2:47 in the morning, someone made a phone call.

I wasn't there to see what happened next. I only know what Koen told me, years later, in pieces, when I asked why certain things still felt like shadows at the edge of a room I couldn't enter.

Julien arrived at the hospital in under twenty minutes. Still in his coat. Unshaven. He must have driven himself because no one who loved him would have let him behind a wheel that night.

Dr. Holt led him to the morgue.

There was a steel table. A shape beneath a sheet. And on the hand — on the left hand, the ring finger — was a band of white gold with a single inlaid diamond. The ring Julien had chosen. The ring he had slid onto my finger in front of everyone who mattered to him.

The attendant told him there was no face left to see.

He grabbed the edge of the table.

He screamed my name.

And then he went down. Onto the floor of the morgue, in his expensive coat, and he did not get up for a very long time.

Dr. Holt watched from the hallway.

Koen was already in a car with me, headed for the airport. He didn't watch. He kept his eyes on the road and one hand on the wheel and the other hand close to mine, not touching, just close, in case I needed it.

I think I needed it.

---

I don't remember the drive.

I remember the airport in fragments. The cold of the terminal. The way the fluorescent lights buzzed just slightly. A woman ahead of us in line with a red suitcase. Koen's hand at the small of my back, steering me gently, like I was something that might tip over.

On the plane, I sat by the window and watched the runway lights blur past. My head hurt. It had been hurting for hours — a deep, pressing ache behind my eyes, like something trying to get out or something trying to stay in. I pressed two fingers to my temple.

Koen noticed. He always noticed.

"Still hurting?" he asked.

"Yeah." I turned from the window. "Why does my head hurt so much?"

He looked at me for a moment. Something moved through his expression — not quite grief, not quite relief. Something in between that I didn't have a name for.

"You were in an accident," he said. His voice was very careful. Very gentle. "Some memories might not come back all the way. That's normal. That's okay."

I frowned. "What kind of accident?"

"The kind you survived," he said. "That's the part that matters."

I thought about that. Turned it over. Tried to find the edges of what I couldn't remember, the way you probe a sore tooth with your tongue.

There was something there. A shape in the dark. A name I couldn't quite reach.

I stopped reaching.

"Okay," I said.

The plane lifted. The city fell away beneath us — all those lights, all those streets, all those rooms where things had happened that I couldn't name anymore. I watched it go. I didn't feel anything I could identify. Just the pressure in my head, and the seat beneath me, and Koen sitting very still beside me.

I reached over and took his hand.

I don't know why. It just felt like the right thing to do. Like something my body knew even when my mind didn't.

His fingers closed around mine. Carefully. Like I was something worth keeping.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"Seattle," he said.

"Is it nice there?"

A pause. Then, quietly: "It will be."

I leaned my head back against the seat. Outside the window, there was nothing but dark sky and the faint suggestion of clouds. The headache pressed on. But his hand was warm.

I closed my eyes.

I didn't dream of anything.