Chapter 3

Dylan said he needed personal space and time to process everything.

He said he couldn't accept the reality of being married and couldn't handle any physical closeness with me.

So I moved back to our house, and he stayed at the old apartment.

Without Dylan, the full weight of the company landed on my shoulders.

Business trips, client dinners, networking events, staffing changes, and every major decision that needed to be made.

I was so busy that I didn't have a single moment to myself.

But when exhaustion pushed me to my limit, I would glance at the photo of us on my desk, and something inside me would steady again.

We had built this company together from nothing, and it carried both of our dreams. I refused to let anything fall apart while he was gone.

The day I discovered Dylan's affair was a rare, beautiful sunny day.

I had worked overtime for an entire week to carve out half a day off, and my heart raced with excitement the whole drive over.

Dylan was an old-fashioned man. The most romantic thing he could think of was sitting with me in the sun.

It was nothing fancy, but I loved those quiet moments together in the warmth, soaking in the simple comfort of an ordinary afternoon.

Before I even reached the building, I spotted him standing outside with a bouquet in his hands, looking exactly the way he used to.

My eyes burned with tears, and for one breathless second, I believed he had gotten his memory back.

But before I could step out of the car and call his name, a woman threw herself into his arms.

He looked down at her with the softest smile, and it cut through my chest like a knife.

I knew that woman.

She was my adoptive parents' biological daughter, my birth parents' precious darling, and my sister in name only, Mila Stewart.

I had imagined a thousand possible outcomes, but never once did I consider that Dylan would fall in love with someone else.

He pulled Mila behind him and fixed me with a cold stare while I lost control.

Dylan snapped at me. "Sarah, if you want to throw a tantrum, go do it at your own place. You have no shame, but we do."

I couldn't accept that he had cheated on me, and I especially couldn't accept that he had cheated on me with Mila. I grabbed at him, demanding an explanation.

Dylan furrowed his brow and looked at me.

He said flatly, "Sarah, how could I have ever loved a woman like you?"

His voice turned harder. "Even if I did love you before, I don't remember any of it now. All I know is that the person I love is Mila."

He didn't flinch. "People change, Sarah. You already found out, so there's no point in hiding it anymore. Let's get a divorce."

Mila had been cowering behind him the whole time, but the moment she heard that, she dropped to her knees in front of me.

The pitiful tears streaming down her face were her favorite weapon, the same old trick she always pulled.

Mila clasped her hands together and begged. "Sarah, Dylan stopped loving you a long time ago. He only stayed with you all these years because he felt responsible, because he owed you. It was guilt, not love.

"He finally forgot about that burden, and I'm begging you to let him go. Please, just let Dylan go.

"I won't forget what you did for him. From now on, I'll repay that debt myself. Just please stop forcing him to stay."

I didn't believe it.

I refused to believe that Dylan could stop loving me, and I refused to believe that he would betray me with Mila of all people.

He knew everything she had done to me, and he knew I hated her to my core.

But when I looked into his eyes and saw nothing there, I turned and ran.

The truth was impossible to deny. Those eyes that once held only me now looked straight through me, and I was terrified he would say something that would break me even more.

The blood clot in Dylan's brain had dissolved, but the doctors still couldn't explain why his memory hadn't returned. All they could tell me was to wait.

That was when I turned to God.

I knelt in every church and prayed at every altar until my knees were raw and my back could barely straighten.

I tried fasting for days on end, I tried walking barefoot to holy shrines, and I even let a priest perform a blessing to drive away whatever evil might be clinging to him.

Then came the day Dylan's memory finally returned.

By that point, I had been desperate enough to humiliate myself by putting on lingerie and trying to seduce him.

All because he once told me, "Sarah, my body will always recognize you before my mind does."

I had never doubted those words, because Dylan's instincts, the reflexes he had trained into himself over the years, always seemed to shut down around me.

I was hiding in the bedroom when I heard him on the phone with a friend in the living room.

The familiar tone of his voice, the way he sighed between sentences, it all hit me at once, and the tears came pouring down.

In that moment, I knew. He was back.

The Dylan who loved me, the Dylan I loved, had finally come back.

I stood in the doorway, hesitant, like a child who had lost something precious and was now too afraid to believe she had found it again.

I whispered, "Is that you, Dylan?"

He let out a long breath and draped a shawl over my shoulders, and the weight that had been crushing my chest finally lifted.

I threw my arms around him and sobbed, dragging up every last thing he had put me through. "You actually had the nerve to call seventeen-year-old me cheap. You were the one who sweet-talked me into giving it a try. If I had known it would end up like this, nothing in the world could have made me say yes!

"And then you said you liked Mila. That people have the right to change their minds. Do you have any idea how much that destroyed me? Dylan, you bastard. You absolute bastard!"

The doorbell rang, and it was Mila.

I stood tall in front of her, chin up and shoulders back, as I'd already won the war. I said, "Mila, Dylan got his memory back. So pack your things and get the hell out of our house. Now."

I could give up my parents. I could walk away from every dollar the family had. But Dylan was the one thing I would never let go of.

Mila stared at me for a long moment, and then she laughed. She said, "Sure. Then let's see who Dylan actually picks."

The stairwell in the old apartment building was narrow and steep.

Before everything went dark, I caught a glimpse of Dylan's panicked figure rushing toward me and the faint smile curving at the corner of Mila's lips.

When I opened my eyes again, I was in a hospital bed, staring up at the ceiling. Dylan sat in the chair beside me, silent, with a cigarette burning between his fingers.

He said, "I'm sorry, Sarah. I tried. I really did."

He took a slow drag and exhaled. He said, "But the feeling I had before is just gone."

I almost wanted to laugh at that.

His memories had come back, but his love for me hadn't.