A Husband She Couldn't Forget

Alyssa? The name ricocheted in his brain, a boomerang with sharp edges.

Had something happened to her? Just the thought had him widening his stance to keep from staggering where he stood. “What?” he heard himself ask, the single word ragged, overloaded with equal parts fear and regret—fear for whatever could be so bad it had brought her brother to his door again.

And regret for all the ways that he, Connor, had messed up. He’d been a complete ass and he knew it, a selfish kid who’d screwed up his marriage to the most amazing woman in the world—and then refused to even try to fix what he’d broken.

How many times had he wished he could have another shot?

Too many.

But he didn’t deserve another shot. He’d thrown away what he wanted most. And when he’d finally admitted to himself what an idiot he’d been, it was a long way past too late.

The hard fact was that the best thing he could do for Aly was to leave her the hell alone, let her live the life she loved in New York City and find a better guy than him.

Dante’s expression gave him nothing. “We need to talk.”

His heart in his throat and his gut twisted into a double knot, Connor stepped back and gestured his ex-best friend inside.

Dante refused Connor’s stilted offer of coffee. In the living room, Aly’s brother stood by the slate fireplace and flatly recited the scary facts. “Four days ago, driving home from Portland International, reportedly in an effort to avoid an oncoming car, Aly swerved and ran into a tree. She wasn’t speeding, but she was going fast enough that her rental car was totaled.”

Connor’s heart, still stuck in his throat, seemed to have turned to a block of solid ice. “What are you telling me? My God, is she...?”

“She’s alive, but she’s pretty banged up. And she had a concussion. She was knocked unconscious, though not for that long.”

Connor’s heart slid down into his chest again and recommenced beating—too fast. “So then, you’re saying she’s okay?”

“Not exactly...”

Connor shoved his hands in his own pockets to keep from grabbing Dante and shaking more information from him—or worse, punching him a few times until he finally explained what had happened to Aly. “Is she okay or not?”

“At first, we thought she was going to be fine.”

“But...?”

“She woke up before dawn the morning after the wreck, and asked for you.”

For a split second, he was the happiest man on the planet—until reality hit him. “She hates me. Why would she ask for me?”

Dante looked at him kind of warily. “Look, man. Maybe you ought to sit down, you know?”

“Just answer the question.”

“Suit yourself. It’s, well, it’s some kind of weird amnesia.”

“What? Wait. Amnesia? What are you telling me? You’re making no sense.”

Dante glared. “I’m trying. But you need to shut up long enough for me to explain.”

Connor winced. “Sorry.” He forked his fingers back through his hair. “I’ll keep my mouth shut. Go on.”

Dante eyed him with skepticism, but then laid it right out there. “My sister is firmly convinced that the two of you are still married.”

Still married. Him and Aly? “That’s crazy.”

“Now you’re getting the picture.” Dante’s expression was bleak. “We’ve tried everything—arguing, reasoning, begging, pacifying. Nothing seems to get her past it. She will not accept that you two have been divorced for years.”

“But...her doctors, they must have some idea of what to do, how to handle this.”

“They’ve tried. There have been CT scans and MRIs, long visits with a therapist—and with Father Francis, too.”

Father Francis. The name brought back memories. Of the little Catholic church on Ocean Road where all the Santangelos had been baptized. Of Aly, a vision in white, coming down the aisle to him. Their wedding had been small, just the families, and put together quickly because they wanted to be married more than they’d wanted all the trappings of a big ceremony and a fancy reception. Father Francis had led them through their wedding vows.

Dante continued, “The brain imaging tests revealed nothing out of the normal range. Father Francis keeps reminding us that God will find a way. The doctors predict that over time she will remember she’s not married anymore and hasn’t been for years. Her real life will come back to her.”

“But...what about right now? How is she now?”

“She’s suffering.” Dante’s dark eyes accused him. “She keeps demanding to see you. At first, she cried and carried on, refusing to listen when we told her that you’d divorced her years ago. Now, she just quietly insists that she doesn’t believe us and she needs to talk to you. We’re kind of out of options at this point. And she’s only getting calmer—and at the same time, more scarily insistent. She says that if you won’t come to her, she’ll hunt you down and demand to know what’s going on, why you’ve suddenly deserted her.”

Connor swore low and sank to the fireplace seat.

Dante went on, “It got worse this morning. She’s started to think that something bad must have happened to you. She’s staying at my folks’ house. Mom called me a half an hour ago to tell me that at breakfast Aly called Dad a liar right to his face. About broke the old man’s heart. I mean, she is his favorite. She told Dad she needed him to tell her why we were all keeping the awful truth from her. My mother’s pregnant, on bed rest. She doesn’t need the extra stress of worrying that Aly’s going to climb out a window and run off in search of you.”

“Of course not.” Connor had always liked Aly’s mom. “Cat’s having another baby?” She had to be almost fifty.

Dante sneered at him. “Didn’t I just say that?”

Connor put up a hand. “Can you dial back the hostility a notch or two, maybe? It’s not helping.”

“Yeah, well. Let’s just be honest here. I don’t trust you. You bring out the worst in me.”

“What do you want me to do, Dante?”

Aly’s brother shook his head. “I hate it. I don’t want you anywhere near her. But she really needs to see you. She needs to hear the truth from you.”

“No problem.” He’d deserted her once. This time, he would be there when she needed him. “I’ll go to her. You said she’s at your parents’ house?”

“Yeah. They discharged her from Memorial day before yesterday.”

“I’ll go over to your folks’ house right now.” He stood.

“You’ll talk to her new shrink first,” growled Dante. “And you’ll do what the doctor tells you to do.”

Connor put up both hands in complete surrender. “However it has to be, I’m in. Where do I go to see the psychiatrist?”

“You don’t go anywhere. I’ll drive you there.”

“Why?”

“The family won’t have you taking this over, trying to run this show. You’re not her husband anymore. You’ve got no claim on her and if you want to help, you’ll do it our way.”

A spike of adrenaline had Connor on the verge of saying something he would almost certainly regret. But he wasn’t the same hotheaded, self-centered kid he’d been when he’d ruined his marriage to Aly. This wasn’t about him. It wasn’t about Dante. It wasn’t about their lifelong friendship that had been tested more than once and ended up turning into something hard and dark and ready to explode.

This was about Aly. Connor would remember that. “Fine. I’ll ride with you.” He took his cell from his pocket. “Let me just call Daniel.” The oldest of Connor’s siblings, Daniel ran the family company, Valentine Logging. Connor was CFO.

Dante eyed him with furious suspicion. “We don’t need the family business on the street. What’s your brother got to do with this?”

“For God’s sake, chill. I need to let Daniel know I won’t be in today.”

Dr. Serena Warbury had her office in Valentine Bay’s downtown historic district. She’d taken a room on the second floor of a rambling two-story Craftsman-style house repurposed for professional use. Connor and Dante sat in the downstairs waiting room until Dr. Warbury was ready for them.

Dante didn’t even try to make conversation. He sat with his elbows on the chair arms, fingers laced together between them, and never once even glanced in Connor’s direction.

Connor thumbed through a dog-eared Sports Illustrated. When that got old, he stared out the window and tried not to worry too much about Aly. Eventually, the therapist came down the stairs and led them up to the second floor.

Right off, Connor liked Dr. Warbury. She was smart and direct. It took her no time at all to figure out that Dante’s hostility toward his ex-brother-in-law wouldn’t help the situation. She sent Dante back downstairs to wait. He wasn’t happy about it, but he went.

Connor refused a cup of herbal tea. He took a chair by a window with a partial view of the Pacific a few blocks away. The therapist repeated what Dante had already told him about Aly’s condition and how it would most likely fade over time on its own.

She went on to explain, “Right now, we want her to take it easy. That’s unlikely to happen until we can reduce the anguish and confusion she’s suffering, with her brain telling her one thing and everyone else insisting otherwise. She needs a lot of rest and as little excitement and stress as possible.”

“I get all that. But what can I do?”

“To help her, you will have to be patient and kind—and honest, too. The whole point is to reassure Alyssa that everything will work out, while at the same time never giving her any less than the truth. You can’t ‘humor’ her or go along when she insists something’s true that isn’t. You have to be frank. You are divorced and have been for several years. If she tries to insist otherwise, you must quietly and firmly tell her that’s not true.”

“No lies. I can do that.”

“And you mustn’t indulge your own emotions, either. You have to be calm and steady. Let her lead the conversation. And no matter what she says, you must not become defensive or angry. This is not about you, not an opportunity for you to justify your past actions, whatever they might have been. I’m not privy to the details of your divorce, but I understand from what members of her family have said that it was not amicable.”

“They’re right. I was a dick, okay?”

“Well.” Dr. Warbury seemed to be hiding a smile. “Don’t be overly hard on yourself, either.”

“I get it. I honestly do.”

“If you’re going to become upset, you will upset Alyssa.”

“I won’t upset her,” he vowed, and wondered at himself to promise such a thing. Anything could happen. She might take one look at him and realize he really just pissed her the hell off, no matter how bland and even-tempered he managed to be.

Dr. Warbury smoothed her yellow skirt. “I believe it could be helpful to her, to see you and reassure herself that you are all right, to hear it from you that you two are divorced. But if you don’t think you can keep control of your emotions, please say so now and I will recommend to you and to her family that you stay away.”

By then, he was seriously considering backing out. If seeing him ended up only making it worse for her, he would never forgive himself.

But at the same time, he really wanted to help—and he needed to see her, to find out for himself just how bad off she was, to do whatever he could to make things more bearable for her. She’d always been so strong and focused, so totally in charge of herself and her life. It must be killing her to have her own mind betraying her, to have everyone telling her that reality was not as she believed it to be.

He had no illusions. There was no possibility of a future for them, together, anymore. They’d had something real and true and beautiful. All that was gone now, broken beyond repair, mostly by him. He didn’t want to fix it. He didn’t believe it could be fixed.

He just wanted Aly to be whole and happy. He wanted her to be ready, the way she’d always been, to take on the world. He wanted to be able to picture her living the East Coast life she’d created for herself, making it big in New York, New York.

“I’ll follow your instructions,” he said. “Please tell her brother it’s all right that I see her.”

The ride to Cat and Ernesto’s house was as silent as the one to Dr. Warbury’s office had been.

Dante seethed. Connor had the feeling that anything he said might set him off. He and Dante were the same age, both of them two years older than Alyssa.

It was sad, really. What they’d come to. All through elementary school, middle school and high school, it was Connor and Dante, joined at the hip, the best of friends. Alyssa had been off-limits to Connor then. A guy didn’t put moves on his best friend’s little sister—no matter how much he wanted to.

Aly hadn’t helped. She’d done everything in her power to get him to give in and make a move on her.

She’d started crushing on him when she was thirteen. By then, she already had serious curves to go with her beautiful face, her thick, dark hair, cobalt-blue eyes and milk-white skin. She started wearing shorts and tight T-shirts every chance she got, just to drive him crazy.

But he’d pretended he didn’t notice. His mom and dad had died that year, the year Aly was thirteen. They’d drowned in a tsunami during a vacation in Thailand, of all the awful ways to go. He was all broken up about it, like everyone else in the Bravo family. Whenever Aly tried to get close to him, he would think of his lost parents and nurture the ache inside himself, the feeling of bitter loneliness to be without his mom and dad. He’d always felt a little guilty that he used his parents’ death to protect himself, to keep from getting too close to Dante’s gorgeous little sister.

After a year or so of trying really hard to get his attention, Aly seemed to get the message that he wasn’t going there. She went totally the other way, completely ignoring him. He’d told himself that all he felt was relief. She was Dante’s precious sister and Dante was his best friend in the world. He didn’t need that kind of trouble.

Not long after she turned fifteen, Aly started hanging out with her first boyfriend, Craig Watson. Connor had managed to keep his cool about that, but barely. He’d had a lot of violent fantasies wherein he beat the crap out of Craig. Somehow, he’d managed not to act on those fantasies.

Over time, he’d even succeeded in convincing himself that everything was cool between him and Aly, that he thought of her as an honorary little sister and nothing more.

Until they met up at OU. She was a freshman and he was in his junior year, and Dante was miles away at Portland State. At first, they pretended to each other that they were just friends, that Connor was looking out for her, taking the big brother role while she adjusted to college life.

That pretense died fast.

They were lovers within a week, and by the second week of classes, they were inseparable. Dante completely lost it when he found out. He came after Connor. They fought hard and dirty. Connor broke Dante’s nose and ended up busting the metacarpal bone of his little finger in the process.

But their injuries healed. In time, Dante forgave him and agreed to be best man at the wedding.

Everything was pretty much perfect. Except for Alyssa’s dream for her future, the one Connor had pretended he shared.

Cat and Ernesto Santangelo still lived in the big two-story house where they’d raised their family. Their four sons were all grown up. Pascal and Tony were married, with kids. Dante was divorced with twin daughters. Marco, the youngest, would be nineteen now. Last Connor had heard, Marco still lived at home.

Dante parked in the big graveled turnaround in front of the house, filling an empty space between two other vehicles. A mud-spattered quad cab was parked several yards away. Had all the Santangelo sons shown up for this?

Dante turned off the engine. “Mom and Aly are both fragile right now,” he warned. “You give either of them the slightest hint of grief and you will be dealing with—”

Connor cut him off with a wave of his hand. “I get it. Let’s go in.”

In the house, the full gauntlet of Santangelo men waited for him in the big living room. All four of them—Ernesto, Pascal, Tony and Marco—stared at him through identical angry, coffee-brown eyes. Dante, too, for that matter.

Ernesto, as the patriarch, did the talking, his voice low and carefully controlled. “We don’t want you here, but what else can a man do? My Bella won’t quit asking for you. You’d better not screw this up or we’ll make it a family project to rearrange your face for you.”

Okay, the threats were getting really old. He was here, wasn’t he? He’d promised to keep himself under control. What more did they want? About now, it was getting pretty hard not to imagine how much he would enjoy mixing it up with a Santangelo or two.

Aly, he reminded himself. She’s why you’re here.

Connor kept his voice calm and said what Dr. Warbury had warned him to say. “I’m not here to cause trouble, only to help.”

Several seconds of cold stares ensued. Finally, Ernesto nodded at Marco. “Go on, get your sister.”

“Wait a minute,” Connor put a lot of effort into keeping his voice low and easy. “I’m guessing Aly would rather meet with me in private. I have promised before and I’ll promise again to behave myself. I’m just thinking she’d rather do this without her father and her brothers breathing down her neck.”

“Forget that,” Ernesto and Dante said almost in unison.

Ernesto went on, “You know nothing about what my daughter would rather do. It’s happening here, in the open, where we can keep an eye on you. You will tell her that you’re not married anymore, that you haven’t been married for a long time and that’s gonna be that.”

Connor let a shrug speak for him. He’d tried. At this point, it seemed counterproductive to push the issue.

Marco vanished into the front hall. Nobody spoke. An endless couple minutes ticked by.

And then, at last, Aly appeared in the open doorway to the foyer, with Marco right behind her. She had bruises on her pale arms and two black eyes. A white bandage covered a spot on the left side of her head. The gorgeous, milky skin of her cheeks and forehead was scraped raw and scabbed over. Cuts and scratches marred the soft column of her neck. Only her glorious mane of dark hair appeared unscathed, except for that shaved area on the left side. It was covered with a white bandage. She looked like hell—and so damn beautiful it hurt.

She gasped at the sight of him. He probably did the same. It rocked him, rocked him deep, just to see her again.

There was a moment, endless and so sweet. They stared at each other. God, it was good. A complete lie, yeah, but perfect nonetheless. She was looking at him the way she used to before he screwed it all up. Like he was everything that mattered, the center of her world.

As the seconds ticked by, he grew more and more certain that she would throw herself into his arms. He could not wait.

She didn’t do it, though. Instead she came forward with her head high and held out a hand. Every nerve in his body on fire with hopeless yearning, he took it.

“Come on,” she said, and turned for the foyer again.

“Hey!” Dante started after them as the other Santangelo men let out a chorus of protests.

“Aly, no...”

“Aly, stay here.”

“You’re not leaving this room,” said her dad.

Still holding tight to Connor’s hand, Aly stopped in the doorway. She turned and pinned them all with a look. “I will talk to my husband alone if you don’t mind.”

Dante froze where he stood.

And Ernesto, who never could refuse her anything, gave in. “Let them go.” Suddenly, he looked old.

Not another word was spoken. Aly led Connor across the foyer and up the stairs. She entered the second room along the upstairs hall, the room that had been hers when she was growing up.

He remembered that room. Even after they got married, her mom had kept it for Aly, with her purple satin bedspread and black lacquer furniture. Pictures of him and Aly and of her school friends had remained stuck beneath the mirror frame of the vanity table.

Not anymore, though. Cat had redone it—as a guest room, apparently. The walls were a tan color, the bedspread a soft blue.

He heard Aly shut the door, and turned from studying the room to face her.

“Oh, God,” she whispered. “Connor. At last.”

And then she did throw herself at him.

Heedless of the rules not to encourage her, he opened his arms and grabbed her close. She hopped up, the way she used to do, and wrapped her arms and legs around him.

“Aly...” He tried to be careful of her, to remember her injuries. But at the same time, he couldn’t crush her close enough. She felt like heaven and the ginger scent of her was so sweet, so well remembered. It filled him with longing and regret.

“Connor...” She lifted her head from where she’d buried it against his shoulder. “Oh, Conn...” Tipping her chin high, she offered her mouth to him, surging up higher, eager to meet his lips.

He’d never wanted anything so much in his life as to steal a kiss from her right now.

But he couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t be right.

“Hey, now...” Reluctantly, and much more gently than he’d grabbed her, he eased her thighs from around him. Setting her carefully down, he stepped back.

She stared up at him, shattered. “Tell me.” Bright red stained her battered cheeks. “Say it.”

“I’m sorry, I...” Words failed him.

She’d always been the stronger one. Now, she said it for him in a flat voice. “We’re not married. You filed to divorce me seven years ago. I live in New York and I have a fabulous career. And you and me, we’re just...not anymore.”

He blinked down at her. “So then, you do know? You remember now?”

She laughed then, a wild laugh, and tossed her midnight hair. “No, I do not remember.” She put both hands to her head, as if to steady her brain after shaking it. “But it’s what everyone keeps telling me. It’s what I see in your eyes when I look at you.” She held up her left hand, poked her thumb at her ring finger. “Bare. That’s a big clue, right? My laptop is toast, but they recovered my purse and phone from the wreck of my rental car. I have a New York driver’s license. It says my last name is Santangelo. And I’m on social media. I’ve seen a bunch of great pictures of me with my friends and colleagues in Manhattan. I wear a lot of black and I have amazing shoes.” She put her hands to her head again. “Also, everything’s pretty fuzzy in here. I believe, I’m absolutely certain in my heart, that you and I are still married. But I don’t really remember much specifically—about you and me and our life now. I can’t tell you where we live or what we do, together, day by day...”

“Because we aren’t together.” The words came out of him sounding cold. Cruel. He tried for a gentler tone. “Not anymore. Not for seven years.”

“My family has explained it all to me, over and over, that we broke up because you wanted to stay in Oregon and I was determined to have a career with a major advertising firm. That you divorced me when I took a job in New York.”

“That’s right,” he said gently. “That’s what happened. That’s the truth, at least basically.”

She sneered at him. “Basically, huh? So then, what is the deeper truth, Connor? Tell me about that.”

He’d come here to be honest with her, but still he hesitated, reluctant to admit what a rotten jerk he’d been. “You really don’t remember any of it?”

She raised her hand and laid it carefully over the white bandage on the side of her head. “Just...random images. Nothing makes sense.”