Chapter 1

Toby Clem and I had been together since our school days, all the way to our wedding. Everyone knew him as the kind of husband who spoiled his wife.

After a bad fall, he woke up with his memory stuck in the summer when he was eighteen.

He was about to start college back then, and he had never met me.

He looked at me, eyes full of doubt and distance. "You said you're my wife, but I don't even know you."

I fought off my morning sickness and showed him everything I had—our wedding photos, our chat history, and pictures of the dog we raised together. I showed them to him one by one.

He looked through them all, frowning. When he finished, his voice turned cold. "Even if that's me in those photos, I don't remember any of it. To me, you're a stranger."

After he was discharged, he started looking everywhere for the girl he used to have a crush on in high school.

His friends tried to talk him out of it. "Toby, are you out of your mind? When your memory comes back, you're going to regret this."

He didn't listen. He bought a plane ticket and left the country.

The day I took him to the airport, I stood outside the security gate and watched him walk away without turning back once.

Then I booked another flight and flew in the opposite direction.

*****

The day Toby had his accident was our third wedding anniversary.

I had just come out of the bathroom, pregnancy test in hand, my fingers trembling. There were two bright red lines. It felt like fate had finally decided to be kind to us.

Three years, from meeting in college to getting married after graduation, we had always wanted a child. Every time I took a test, Toby was even more nervous than I was. He would stare at the stick, eyes full of hope.

This time, it was finally positive.

I held the test tightly and stood by the bedroom door, watching him in the living room as he opened a package.

He was wearing that old T-shirt I gave him freshman year. It had been washed so many times that the color had faded, but he refused to throw it away, always saying it was too comfortable.

"Toby," I called out.

He didn't look up. He held the box in his hands. "Yes?"

"I'm pregnant," I said.

The room went quiet for three seconds. Then he suddenly looked up, and the box slipped from his hands and hit the floor. "What did you say?"

I raised the test and waved it at him.

He stared at the two lines as if he could not process what he was seeing. Then, he walked toward me until he stopped right in front of me.

"Really?" His voice was rough, and his eyes lit up.

"Really," I said, nodding.

The next second, he grabbed me and whirled me around the living room.

"I'm going to be a dad!" he shouted. "Wilona! I'm going to be a dad!"

He kept spinning until the room blurred, and I laughed, patting his shoulder. "Put me down. I'm getting dizzy."

He didn't stop. He held me tighter and spun even faster, kissing my face again and again. "Honey, you're amazing. I love you so much. I'm going to be a dad—"

Suddenly, his foot caught on the coffee table.

Everything happened in a split second. I felt him lose balance. I reached for him on instinct, but his arms loosened.

I fell onto the sofa, but he fell backward. The back of his head slammed into the sharp corner of the coffee table.

There was a heavy thud. He lay there, completely still.

"Toby?" My voice trembled. "Toby!"

He didn't answer. Blood started seeping from the back of his head, spreading across the light wood floor.

I dropped to my knees beside him and called for an ambulance, but my voice shook so badly that I could barely get the address out.

It felt like something had grabbed my heart and was squeezing it tighter and tighter until I could not breathe.

*****

The hallway outside the emergency room felt cold and endless.

I sat there for six hours, staring at the closed door, my mind blank.

At some point, my mom called and asked how I had spent our anniversary.

"At the hospital," I said. "Toby fell."

She sounded alarmed. "Is it serious?"

"I don't know. We're still waiting for results," I said.

"Stay there. I'm coming over," she said.

"There's no need," I said. "He'll be fine."

After I hung up, I buried my face in my hands, my shoulders shaking.

He had to be fine. It was just a fall. How bad could it be? We still had a child to raise together. We were supposed to watch our kid grow up together. We were supposed to grow old together. We had promised each other.

At three in the morning, the operating room lights finally went out.

The moment the doctor walked out, I rushed over. "Doctor, how is he?"

"The surgery was successful. We cleared the intracranial bleeding," the doctor said. "But the impact caused retrograde amnesia."

"What does that mean?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.

"He may have lost some of his past memories," the doctor said carefully. "We'll only know exactly what he forgot after he wakes up."

I stood there, stunned, my thoughts tangled.

Lost some memories? Which ones? Tonight? The accident? Or how we ended up here?

I wasn't afraid. None of that mattered. As long as he was alive, as long as he was okay, nothing else mattered.