My Husband Pretended He Forgot Me for His Ex-Wife

I lit the last candle at seven and stepped back to look at the table. White tulips, the good china, a bottle of Bordeaux Kaiser liked. I straightened the centerpiece an inch to the left, then back again. Five years of Valentine's Days, and I still set the table like it mattered.

My phone buzzed at six. *Stuck in a dinner with investors. Don't wait up.* No kiss, no sorry. Just words, flat as a memo. I read it twice and told myself that was just how Kaiser talked now. CEOs didn't have time for hearts and flowers. I poured a glass of wine I didn't drink and sat in the quiet of our penthouse, thirty-two floors above Manhattan, and waited for a man who wasn't coming.

At nine, the phone rang again. Not his number. A woman's voice, calm and practiced. "Mrs. Jenkins? This is Mount Sinai ICU. Your husband was in a car accident. You should come now."

I don't remember grabbing my coat. I don't remember the elevator, or the cab, or the fluorescent hallway. I remember running in my red dinner dress past a nurses' station, my heels loud on the tile, and then I remember stopping cold at the door of his room.

Kaiser was propped up in the bed, a bandage wrapped around his head, one eye swollen shut. He was alive. That was the only thought I had room for. I stepped closer, reached for his hand.

He pulled it back.

"Who is this woman?" he said to the nurse, like I was a stranger who'd wandered into the wrong room.

The nurse looked at me, then at him, confused. "Sir, this is your wife, Brielle."

"I don't have a wife," he said. His eyes moved past me, to the bed beside his, where a woman lay with a bruised cheek and a cut above her brow, an IV taped to her arm. She was beautiful even banged up — dark hair, sharp cheekbones, the kind of face that photographed well from any angle. Kaiser reached his hand across the gap between the beds.

"Baby," he said. "Cat. Are you okay?"

The woman — Catalina, I would learn — turned her head and gave him a small, fragile smile, like she'd been waiting years for him to say that name again.

I stood there in my red dress, holding a hand he didn't want.

The doctor found me in the hallway twenty minutes later, a middle-aged man with tired eyes and a clipboard. "Mrs. Jenkins, I'm Dr. Alvarez. Your husband is presenting with what looks like retrograde amnesia. Based on our conversation with him, his memory currently ends about seven years ago."

"Seven years," I repeated. My voice came out steady. I was proud of that, distantly, the way you're proud of a stranger doing something difficult.

"That would put him back when he was still married to—"

"Catalina Flores," I said. "His ex-wife."

The doctor nodded like I'd passed a small test. "It's not uncommon after a head trauma like this. The brain reverts to a familiar timeline. I'd advise against contradicting him too forcefully right now. It can cause agitation, even setbacks. Give it time."

"How much time?"

"Weeks. Months, possibly." He said it gently, like that was supposed to help.

I asked him three more questions — about treatment, about visitors, about what I should tell people who asked. I nodded at the right places. Then I drove home alone, back to a table set for two, and I sat there until the candles burned down to nothing.

They discharged Kaiser four days later. I came home from picking up his prescriptions to find Catalina's suitcase already open on our bed — my bed — her silk robe draped over the chair where mine used to hang. Kaiser stood in the doorway of the master bedroom, one hand resting lightly on the frame, watching me the way you'd watch someone deliver an unwelcome package.

"Brielle," he said. Just my name, no warmth in it. "You can stay here until we sort out the legal situation. But I think it's better if you're not... underfoot. It's confusing, having you around. For both of us."

"This is my home too," I said. Quiet. Even.

"Is it?" He tilted his head, studying me like I was a stranger making an odd claim. "I don't remember you, Brielle. I'm sorry, but I don't. What am I supposed to do with that?"

Behind him, Catalina folded a sweater into a drawer — my drawer — and didn't look up, but I saw the corner of her mouth curve, just slightly, like she was hiding a smile in the fabric.

I didn't argue. I went down the hall to the small guest room at the end, the one we used for visiting relatives twice a year, and I set my suitcase on the narrow bed. I hung my dresses in a closet built for spare towels. I didn't cry. I told myself I was being patient. I told myself this was temporary, a fog that would lift.

I didn't know yet how long a man could pretend to be lost, when being lost was exactly where he wanted to stay.