‘It might be exactly the same as when I woke up this morning?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It might.’
That I might wake up and have forgotten Adam and Ben seemed too much to contemplate. It felt like it would be a living death.
‘But—’ I began.
‘Keep your journal, Christine,’ he said. ‘You still have it?’
I shook my head. ‘He burned it. That’s what caused the fire.’
Dr Nash looked disappointed. ‘That’s a shame,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t really matter. Christine, you’ll be fine. You can begin another. The people who love you have come back to you.’
‘But I want to have come back to them, too,’ I said. ‘I want to have come back to them.’
We talked for a little while longer, but he was keen to leave me with my family. I know he was only trying to prepare me for the worst — for the possibility that I will wake up tomorrow with no idea where I am, or who this man sitting next to me is, or who the person is who is claiming to be my son — but I have to believe that he is wrong. That my memory is back. I have to believe that.
I look at my sleeping husband, silhouetted in the dim room. I remember us meeting, that night of the party, the night I watched the fireworks with Claire on the roof. I remember him asking me to marry him, on holiday in Verona, and the rush of excitement I’d felt as I said yes. And our wedding too, our marriage, our life. I remember it all. I smile.
‘I love you,’ I whisper, and I close my eyes, and I sleep.
This book was inspired in part by the lives of several amnesiac patients, most notably Henry Gustav Molaison and Clive Wearing, whose story has been told by his wife Deborah Wearing in her book
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