She’d been right when she’d hypothesized why no one had rushed to her bedside. She was heartless.
What else could explain harboring such harshness toward someone who’d been so afflicted? The man she’d promised to love in sickness and in health? The one she’d basically felt “good riddance” toward when death did them part?
In the next moment, the air was sucked out of her lungs from a bigger blow.
“Cybele? ¿Te duele?”
Her ears reverberated with the concern in Rodrigo’s voice, her vision rippled over the anxiety warping his face.
No. She wasn’t okay.
She was a monster. She was amnesic.
And she was pregnant.
Four
Excruciating minutes of dry retching later, Cybele lay surrounded by Rodrigo, alternating between episodes of inertness and bone-rattling shudders.
He soothed her with the steady pressure of his containment, wiping her eyelids and lips in fragrant coolness, his stroking persistent, hypnotic. His stability finally earthed her misery.
He tilted the face she felt had swollen to twice its original size to his. “You remembered something else?”
“A few things,” she hiccupped, struggled to sit up. The temptation to lie in his arms was overwhelming. The urge only submerged her under another breaker of guilt and confusion.
He helped her sit up, then severed all contact, no doubt not wanting to continue it a second beyond necessary.
Needing to put more distance between them, she swung her numb legs to the floor, slipped into the downy slippers that were among the dozens of things he’d supplied for her comfort, things that felt tailored to her size and needs and desires.
She wobbled with her IV drip pole to the panoramic window overlooking the most amazing verdant hills she’d ever seen. Yet she saw nothing but Rodrigo’s face, seared into her retinas, along with the vague but nausea-inducing images of Mel in his wheelchair, his rugged good looks pinched and pale, his eyes accusing.
She swung around, almost keeled over. She gasped, saw Rodrigo’s body bunch like a panther about to uncoil in a flying leap. He was across the room, but he’d catch her if she collapsed.
She wouldn’t. Her skin was crackling where he’d touched her. She couldn’t get enough of his touch but couldn’t let him touch her again. She held out a detaining hand, steadied herself.
He still rose but kept his distance, his eyes catching the afternoon sun, which poured in ropes of warm gold through the wall-to-wall glass. Their amalgamated color glowed as he brooded across the space at her, his eyebrows lowered, his gaze immobilizing.
She hugged her tender left shoulder, her wretchedness thickening, hardening, settling into concrete deadness. “The things I just remembered…I wouldn’t call them real memories. At least, not when I compare them to the memories I’ve been accumulating since I regained consciousness. I remember those in Technicolor, frame by frame, each accompanied by sounds and scents and sensations. But the things I just recalled came in colorless, soundless and shapeless, like skeletons of data and knowledge. Like headings without articles. If that makes any sense.”
He lowered his eyes to his feet, before raising them again, the surgeon in him assessing. “It makes plenty of sense. I’ve dealt with a lot of post-traumatic amnesia cases, studied endless records, and no one described returning memories with more economy and efficiency than you just did. But it’s still early. Those skeletal memories will be fleshed out eventually…”
“I don’t want them fleshed out. I want them to stop coming, I want what came back to disappear.” She squeezed her shoulder, inducing more pain, to counteract the skewer turning in her gut. “They’ll keep exploding in my mind until they blow it apart.”
“What did you remember this time?”
Her shoulders sagged. “That Mel was a paraplegic.”
He didn’t nod or blink or breathe. He just held her gaze. It was the most profound and austere acknowledgment.
And she moaned the rest, “And I’m pregnant.”
He blinked, slowly, the motion steeped in significance. He knew. And it wasn’t a happy knowledge. Why?
One explanation was that she’d been leaving Mel, but he’d become paralyzed and she’d discovered her pregnancy and it had shattered their plans. Was that the origin of the antipathy she had felt radiating from him from time to time? Was he angry at her for leading him on then telling him that she couldn’t leave her husband now that he was disabled and she was expecting his child?
She wouldn’t know unless he told her. It didn’t seem he was volunteering any information.
She exhaled. “Judging from my concave abdomen, I’m in the first trimester.”
“Yes.” Then as if against his better judgment, he added, “You’re three weeks pregnant.”
“Three weeks…? How on earth do you know that? Even if you had a pregnancy test done among others before my surgery, you can’t pinpoint the stage of my pregnancy that accurate-” Her words dissipated under another gust of realization. “I’m pregnant through IVF. That’s how you know how far along I am.”
“Actually, you had artificial insemination. Twenty days ago.”
“Don’t tell me. You know the exact hour I had it, too.”
“It was performed at 1:00 p.m.”
She gaped at him, finding nothing to explain that too-specific knowledge. And the whole scenario of her pregnancy.
If it had been unplanned and she’d discovered it after she’d decided to leave Mel, that would still make her a cold-blooded two-timer. But it hadn’t been unplanned. Pregnancies didn’t come more planned than that. Evidently, she’d wanted to have a baby with Mel. So much that she’d made one through a procedure, when he could no longer make one with her the normal way. The intimate way.
So their marriage had been healthy. Until then. Which gave credence to Rodrigo’s claim that they’d been planning a honeymoon. Maybe to celebrate her pregnancy.
So how come her first reaction to his death was bitter relief, and to her pregnancy such searing dismay?
What kind of twisted psyche did she have?
There was only one way to know. Rodrigo. He kept filling in the nothingness that had consumed most of what seemed to have been a maze of a life. But he was doing so reluctantly, cautiously, probably being of the school that thought providing another person’s memories would make reclaiming hers more difficult, or would taint or distort them as they returned.
She didn’t care. Nothing could be more tainted or distorted than her own interpretations. Whatever he told her would provide context, put it all in a better light. Make her someone she could live with. She had to pressure him into telling her what he knew…
Her streaking thoughts shrieked to a halt.
She couldn’t believe she hadn’t wondered. About how he knew what he knew. She’d let his care sweep her up, found his knowledge of her an anchoring comfort she hadn’t thought to question.
She blurted out the questions under pressure. “Just how do you know all this? How do you know me? And Mel?”
The answer detonated in her mind.
It was that look in his eyes. Barely curbed fierceness leashed behind the steel control of the surgeon and the suave refinement of the man. She remembered that look. Really remembered it. Not after she’d kissed him. Long before that. In that life she didn’t remember.
In that life, Rodrigo had despised her.
And it hadn’t been because she’d led him on, then wouldn’t leave Mel. It was worse. Far worse.
He’d been Mel’s best friend.
The implications of this knowledge were horrifying.