In all the time since they’d been back in Rome, she’d stayed out of his way. Available should he require her assistance, but back in the penthouse—where she had been sleeping in one of the guest rooms the whole time he’d been away, apparently—they hardly interacted at all. When he’d asked one night why she appeared to be avoiding him in the home they shared, she’d only smiled sweetly and told him that she was very cognizant of the fact that he needed to find his own way back into his life. That she didn’t want to intrude.
The entire situation set his teeth on edge. And Leonidas didn’t particularly care to investigate why that was.
“I’m glad you called me in,” Susannah was saying. “Because I’ve wanted to speak to you, too. I didn’t want to rush into this until you’d been home long enough to really feel as if you’d got your feet beneath you, but I also don’t think there’s any point in dragging things out unnecessarily.”
Leonidas knew he needed to say what he’d wanted to say, or he wouldn’t. Because he hadn’t believed it was happening at first. He assumed it was stress, or that perhaps he was overwhelmed—though he couldn’t recall ever being overwhelmed before in his life. Then again, his life had never included a lost four years and a cult before now.
Then this morning he’d sat in a meeting, listening to the discussion all around him and well aware that the people speaking were among those he ought to have recognized. He’d recognized the names on the memo that his secretary had handed him, but he hadn’t been able to match names to faces.
“There are holes in my memory,” he told her now, before he thought better of it. He stayed where he was. Tall and straight and with all that glass and Rome behind him, as if that would make a difference. As if that would make him whole.
Susannah blinked, and he thought she froze. “Holes?”
“I know who I am. I know you. I certainly knew my mother when she finally deigned to appear the other night, in all her state.”
“Apollonia is not easily forgotten. Though one might have occasion to wish otherwise.”
“But there is so much I can’t remember. Too much.”
There. He’d said it. He waited for it to hit him—for the fact that he’d admitted to such weakness to take his knees out from under him where he stood. The way his father would have taken his knees out for him, were he still alive.
But it didn’t happen.
And it was because of her, Leonidas knew it. She was why he hadn’t keeled over in the telling of this most disastrous of truths. She only gazed at him as if she was perfectly happy to wait as long as it took for him to tell her the rest of it.
“Faces. Names. Business decisions I clearly made years ago.” He shrugged. “I don’t have access to any of it.”
She considered, her hands seeming to tighten in her lap. “Is this all the time?”
“No. But it’s enough. I was in a meeting of vice presidents this morning and I didn’t know a single person in the room. And not all of them were hired in the past four years.”
“No, they weren’t.” She was frowning then, that gaze of hers fixed on his, and there was no reason Leonidas should have felt something like relief. That someone other than him knew. That it wasn’t only his weight to carry. “Do they know you can’t remember them?”
He let out a harsh sound without meaning to do it. “That would be bad optics, I realize,” he said, perhaps more sternly than necessary. “I would hate to dilute the message.”
Susannah didn’t appear to move, and yet Leonidas was certain her back was straighter than it had been before.
“I was less concerned with the optics, or any message you might have sent, and more concerned with you.” Her lips pressed together in a firm line, and Leonidas couldn’t possibly have said why he felt chastened. “I expect you managed to cover it so no one could tell you didn’t remember them.”
“I did.” He inclined his head. “But I worry it is only a matter of time before I find myself in a situation where covering it is not possible.”
She appeared to mull that over. “What did the doctor say about any lingering memory loss? Did the subject arise?”
Leonidas had not been at all interested in seeing a doctor when he’d finally made it home, as it had seemed like yet another admission of weakness to him. But he had eventually succumbed to the family doctors who had tended to the Betancur family for years, because in the end, how could he not? Whether it was a weakness or not, there was no one more concerned with the four years he’d lost than him. He was the one who would had lived through them, convinced that he was someone else entirely.