A Hard Man to Forget (7 page)

She shrugged and lowered her eyes. “It’s not your fault.
I just always believed I had family somewhere. All I had to do is
remember them. After no one came forward to identify me, I thought I
came to terms with the idea that there simply wasn’t anyone out
there. I guess I was wrong.”

At that moment, Simon would have given anything to take away the
miserable expression on her face and have her scowling at him again.
“There was family. Your—Meredith's—mother died when
she was very young. Her father passed away shortly before we were
married.”

She forced a weak smile, utterly devoid of mirth. “I didn’t
even know them and it feels like I lost them all over again.”

“Would you like to see pictures?”

Her head snapped up. “You have some?”

“Of course. That was my brilliant plan. The only way to prove
you are Meredith is to bring back your memory. I was up in the attic
getting the photo albums while you were making your call.”

The scowl was back. She glared at him, unrepentant. “When can I
see them?”

“They’re in the living room.”

She immediately jumped to her feet. She glanced hesitantly at her
plate.

Simon started, instantly understanding her intention. She wasn’t
sure if she should help clear the table. He hadn’t expected it
of her. It was, however, a very Meredith thing to do.

He waved her away. “Go ahead. I’ll take care of those.”

Nodding without sparing him a glance, she darted away from the table.
She stopped at the entryway and glanced down the hall in both
directions uncertainly.

“To the left,” he sighed.

He watched her disappear around the corner, noting the hitch in her
stride. She walked with a slight, almost unnoticeable limp. He’d
noticed it in Harrisville, but hadn’t thought much of it. Now,
knowing her history, it was more obvious. It was hard to see it and
not be reminded of what she’d been through.

Simon rose to his feet, turning the conversation over in his head.
She was convincing, he’d give her that. That didn’t mean
he was anywhere close to trusting her.

THE TWO PHOTO ALBUMS were thick, containing well over a hundred pages
each. Dust blanketed the worn leather covers. From the looks of
things, Simon certainly hadn’t spent much time poring over
their pages. He also hadn’t thrown them away, a far more
telling sign in her mind.

She forgot about the grime as soon as she opened the first page and
became engrossed in its contents.

The first album contained pictures from Meredith’s childhood.
She lingered over the pictures of Meredith’s parents, her
sweet-eyed mother and adoring father. She wished she could remember
them and their love for their daughter, so plainly visible on their
faces, the way they couldn’t stop looking at her and smiling
down on her in every photograph. She wondered what it would be like
to be that well loved. This was what she’d imagined all those
times over the last two years when she’d comforted herself with
the thought that someone out there was missing her this much. Instead
her parents—if this was really them—were long gone.

Wistful, she forced herself to move on.

Meredith had been a happy child, well-loved and well-liked. There
were pictures of school friends, so many she lost track of all the
faces. She couldn’t even imagine having so many friends, so
many people who knew her name and cared about her. Something inside
of her twisted painfully as she surveyed the smiling faces.

The first album took Meredith almost to adulthood. She guessed before
she opened it that the second chronicled her years with Simon. One
peek at the first page proved she was right.

She sensed Simon enter the room behind her though he didn’t
make a sound. He came to stand behind her, hovering just beyond her
field of vision. She was glad. She wasn’t sure she could face
those accusing eyes again just yet.

She tapped a finger against the photograph opened before her. “How
old was she here?”

“Twenty-three,” he supplied instantly. “That’s
how old she was when we were married.”

“And how old am...would she be now?”

“Twenty-nine.”

That certainly fit with the estimate the doctors had given her when
she’d first been found. There was something much more
reassuring about having a concrete number instead of an estimate,
knowing she was twenty-nine instead of “around thirty.”
If she was, indeed, Meredith.

Careful, Laura
, she warned herself. Don’t get caught up
in this. You don’t know yet if it’s true. She had the
feeling she’d have to remind herself of that a few more times.
It was too tempting to accept all of this, with everything she could
remember wanting laid out right in front of her. Family. Friends.
Love.

She peered down at the photograph in her lap. Meredith had her arms
wound around Simon’s neck. She was smiling, of course, and was
saying something. His expression was much more severe. He was trying
not to smile and wasn’t having much luck.

Strange. She’d thought he was like this, all quiet and
brooding, because of what happened to his wife. But the early
pictures in the album indicated he was like this before Meredith
disappeared, back when they first met. She’d done something to
change him, to make him happy. And once she was gone, he reverted
back to the way he was before.

“How did the two of you meet?” she asked.

Simon didn’t answer. Laura peered back over her shoulder at
him. His face was an emotionless mask.

“I thought you wanted me to remember.”

He swallowed stiffly. “Yes. I’m just not sure I want to.”

Pain flashed across his features, so sharp she felt it too. She
almost reached out to comfort him. The reaction surprised her. He
cleared his throat and the mask fell back into place before she had
the chance.

“I was looking for a place away from the city, somewhere
secluded where I could get some time to myself without having worry
about being bothered. A broker found a place for me here. It wasn’t
much more than a shack, but it was cheap and it suited me.”

Laura gave a doubtful glance around the room. “If this is your
idea of a shack, then I’ve spent the last two years living in a
cardboard box.”

She could tell she’d managed to amuse him. “The cabin is
located up on the hill behind the house. I built this place when we
were married. Anyway, Meredith was the welcome wagon. She came to
greet me the day I moved in.”

“She lived in town?”

Laura saw him nod out of the corner of her eye. “Her whole
life. She grew up in Rockwell. She knew everyone and they all knew
her. I don’t think she ever wanted to be anywhere else.”

Laura could see why. If she had people who loved her, people who knew
her, she wasn’t sure anything could take her away from them.
“And yet you think she left.”

Though she couldn’t see him, she sensed his defenses closing
down again. “Things changed. She changed.”

You changed
, Laura thought, looking down at the smiling man in
the photograph. But she could see he was right. Flipping through the
album, it was impossible to miss the change in Meredith from the
first page to the last. On the first, she looked so young and her
smile was bright and open. As Laura turned the pages, Meredith’s
smile gradually dimmed and the light slowly went out of her eyes. On
the last page, her expression was bleak and hopeless as she stared
out at the lake behind the house. The pensive woman bore little
resemblance to the one pictured at the beginning of the album. Laura
had no problem imagining this woman killing herself in the lake. That
seemed to be exactly what she was contemplating in the photograph.

“What happened?” Laura whispered, unnerved by what she
was seeing.

“She wasn’t cut out for life out here. Hell, she knew
that from the start. That first day she came out here, I told her I
would be fine by myself. She didn’t listen. She kept coming
back, didn’t think anyone should be alone out here, even though
that’s why I bought the place. She was persistent, said she
would keep me company.”

“Until finally you stopped trying to push her away.”

She felt him tense. “You remember?”

“No,” she said quickly. “It seems obvious
considering how things ended.”

He sighed. “Right. I fell in love with her. Everyone who met
her did. You can probably see why. We were married a few months after
we first met.”

Laura flipped back to their wedding portrait. She tried to imagine
herself as a twenty-three year old bride. She couldn’t. She
couldn’t remembering loving anyone as much as Meredith appeared
to love Simon, couldn’t imagine ever inspiring that look in a
man’s eyes. Not even close.

“And that’s when you built the house?”

“Yes. I built it for her, based on her ideas and designs.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. Finally, he whispered, so
soft she could barely hear him. “I thought we would be happy
here. And we were, for a while.”

The pain she heard in his voice shook her to the core. Once again, it
was all she could do not to turn around and place her hand on his
arm, to touch him in sympathy. Whatever his actions the last few
days, this man had lost a great deal. She couldn’t help be
moved.

But she didn’t look back to comfort him. She doubted he would
appreciate the gesture. After all, he blamed her for everything that
had happened. The desertion, the abandonment.

He sighed. “And then she became depressed.”

A knot of tension formed in Laura’s stomach. She wasn’t
sure she wanted to hear this part. But she had to, she needed to.
“What happened?”

She could almost hear him swallow. “At first, the strain of
living so far away from other people started to wear on her. She was
the kind of person who lived off of being around others. They
gravitated toward her. She needed that interaction and couldn’t
get it out here. God knows, I couldn’t give it to her, not like
that. I never should have brought her here.”

“It was her choice, wasn’t it?”

“And she paid for it.”

Laura shuddered. His voice was so cold, so matter-of-fact, she
wondered if he thought she’d gotten exactly what she asked for.

He continued, “It got worse after the second miscarriage. She
stopped going into town. She wasn’t talking to people. All she
wanted was to be pregnant again. I let her convince me it was a good
idea. It was all she wanted. I thought it would make her happy and
everything would be all right again. Then she lost the third baby
three months into her term. That’s when she became truly
despondent. She wanted a child more than anything. The loss was
especially hard on her. That’s why most people in town weren’t
surprised at the idea that she killed herself.”

“But not you.”

“No.” His voice rang with absolute certainty. “They
weren’t around her every day like I was. There was more to it
than depression. She started to act strange. Secretive. She was
depressed, yes. But it was more than that. It wasn’t until
after she disappeared that I realized what it was. She was planning
to leave all along.”

It sounded to Laura like she could have simply been planning her
suicide and not wanted him to know about it. She didn’t bother
to bring up the point. It would take more than conjecture to convince
him of it. “Did you talk to her therapist about it after she
disappeared?”

Simon nodded. “He was pretty shaken by what happened. He
thought they were making progress, but he said a relapse like that
wasn’t completely unexpected. I think he felt somewhat
responsible.”

“You sound like you don’t agree.”

“He might have been if she’d killed herself.”

“And you don’t believe that.”

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

Laura decided that was better left unanswered.

When she didn’t say anything, he asked, “Remember any of
this?”

Laura bit her lip and shook her head. “No.” And that
bothered her. She looked at the woman in the photographs, the woman
who had her face, and tried to picture herself having this woman’s
life. Nothing seemed familiar, no matter how much she wanted it to.
She wanted to be the bright-eyed woman with the beautiful smile whose
husband looked at her as though she was the only thing in his world.
She wanted to be the sweetly shy woman who fit perfectly in his arms.
She even wanted to be the sad-eyed woman with the haunted expression.
It didn’t matter how horrible the past might be as long as she
had one. If she was this woman, she would have all the answers to so
many questions and everything would make sense again. Her world,
which had been off-kilter for so long, would finally be righted.

But her memory banks remained voids that offered no answers.

Simon came around the couch, startling her. That look was back in his
eyes, the one that dared her to lie and try to fool him. He lowered
himself on the other end of the cushion. He was as far away as he
could be, and still, he was too close. She felt him too keenly.

“Tell me about your ‘condition,’” he
commanded. She didn’t miss the twist he put on that final word.
“Is it usual for someone with your injuries not to have
regained her memory two years later?”

She narrowed her eyes. Why did she have the feeling he already knew
the answer to that, that he was testing her? “No. Usually it’s
a short term memory loss. Anything long-term tends to involve much
more of a loss than I sustained, including loss of verbal skills,
inability to perform simple tasks, things like that. At first I
wasn’t as worried about it. I was dealing with the physical
therapy and it was all I could concentrate on. The doctors kept
assuring me that my memory would come back eventually, but it never
did. When I finally was doing better physically, I turned my
attention to healing mentally.”

“And you weren’t able to regain any memories?”

Laura shook her head. “I’ve been working with a therapist
for almost the entire two years. We’ve tried hypnosis, various
methods of memory retrieval, but haven’t come up with anything
yet. You don’t know how frustrating it is. My therapist finally
concluded that the memory block isn’t related to my physical
injuries. It’s psychological. Something’s keeping me from
remembering. It’s like my brain is trying to protect me from
something.”