She felt her hand being pressed. The doctor’s voice. ‘You know who this man is?’
It was hard for her to tear her gaze away from him, as if she was afraid he might disappear. She nodded. ‘Yes...we just met, the other night. At a function.’ He frowned slightly, but she barely noticed as heat crept into her cheeks, remembering seeing him for the first time. How he’d stopped her in her tracks with his breath-taking beauty and charisma, wearing a tuxedo that had been moulded to his powerful body like a second skin.
He’d looked bored. People had hovered around him but at a distance as if too intimidated to get close.
And then their eyes had met and... Bam! Her heart had somersaulted in her chest and she’d never been the same since...
Slowly it was sinking in that she was in a hospital. But what was she doing here? With a man she barely knew?
But you do know him. Intimately.
She felt it in her bones, like a deep knowing. But how did she know this if she’d only just met him? She tried to latch onto the question to find the answer but it skittered out of her grasp.
Confusion clouded her brain and for the first time she had a sense that something was very wrong. A tendril of fear...or panic...coiled in her belly. She looked at the doctor. ‘What’s happening? Why am I here?’
As she said the word I, she stopped. I. Nothing. Blank. A void. The fear grew. ‘Wait... I don’t know...who I am... Who am I?’
Then something popped into her head. The doctor had called her... ‘You said Mrs Vasilis...’
The doctor looked at her with an expression that was hard to decipher. ‘Because you are Mrs Vasilis. Sasha Vasilis.’
Sasha. It felt wrong. Not her. ‘I don’t think that’s my name.’
‘What is your name?’
Blank. Nothing. Frustration.
The doctor spoke again. Soothingly. ‘Sasha. Your name is Sasha and you are married to this man, Apollo Vasilis.’
She looked at the man again. He was definitely frowning now and he didn’t look particularly happy to be married to her. She shook her head briefly but it caused a sharp pain over her eye. She stopped. ‘But that can’t be possible, we just met.’
So, if you just met, how can you know him intimately? How can you be married?
A headache was forming, right between her eyes. A dull throb. As if sensing this, the doctor said briskly, ‘That’s enough for now, she needs to rest. We can come back later.’
A nurse stepped forward and did something to a drip beside the bed. Soon that comforting blackness was enveloping her in its warm embrace again and she eagerly shut out the growing panic and fear, and disturbing questions. And him, the most disturbing thing of all, and she wasn’t even sure why.
Two days later
‘We think your memory loss came from the traumatic experience of the crash. There’s no perceptible or obvious injury to your brain that we can see after the scans we did, but you can only remember meeting your husband for the first time and nothing else. Nothing from before or after. Sometimes the brain does this as a form of protection when an event occurs. We’ve no reason not to believe that in time your memory will return. It could come in small pieces, like a jigsaw coming together, or it could happen all at once.’
Or it might not happen at all?
She was too scared to voice that out loud.
‘Which is why...’ here the doctor looked expressively at Apollo Vasilis, who was a forbidding presence as he stood by the window with his arms folded ‘...you need to be monitored closely while you recuperate.’
The doctor looked back at Sasha, who still didn’t feel like a Sasha. ‘Don’t worry too much about trying to make your memory come back. You need to focus on recovering from your injuries. I’m sure everything will return to full functionality.’
Sasha wondered what her brain was protecting her from.
The doctor stood up. ‘You can go home now. We’ll keep in touch to monitor your progress and let us know as soon as you start to remember anything.’
That felt like a very dim and distant possibility. Her brain still felt as if it was just a dense mass of grey fog. Impossible to penetrate. And where was home? The doctor had told her she was English, so presumably she’d been born and brought up there.
When she’d enquired about family, her husband had told her that her parents were dead and she had no siblings. Just like that. Stark and unvarnished. She’d felt an ache in her chest near her heart but when she couldn’t put names or faces to her parents it was hard to feel profound grief.
The doctor left now and Sasha looked at Apollo Vasilis. Her husband. He looked as grim as he had when she’d regained consciousness. Wasn’t he pleased she’d survived the accident? He wore a three-piece suit today, steel grey, with a tie. He oozed urbane sophistication but Sasha sensed the tightly wound energy in his body. As if he was ready to cast off the trappings of civility to reveal a much more elemental man underneath.