Something terrible had happened to me to make me look like I did. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just a wild week, or I’d finally gotten the flu or had contracted a slight case of Mad Cow. I hoped it wasn’t the latter because I could hear my mother Regina’s comments now.

I got up and put on the ill-fitting pointy booties. Had I lost all my fantastic fashion sense in the intervening two years? What else had happened in my life?

In the bathroom, I found a hairbrush, a new toothbrush, and toothpaste. I forced myself to look in the mirror. Oswald was quite dishy, and I looked hideous.

I tilted my head forward until it touched the cool glass of the mirror. Don’t panic, I thought.

I went to the window and looked out. The garden had so many of my signature touches, including Kathleen hybrid musk roses, that I should have known it was mine immediately. Oh, I’d made an herb knot just like I’d always wanted to! This was the bright side.

I walked to the kitchen and called, “Hellooo?”

There was a glass pitcher on the table with red liquid. Just looking at it made my stomach spasm with want. I got a tumbler, served myself, and took a sip. It was a tasty fruit juice, heavy on the raspberries. I gulped it down and had another glass.

I wandered through the house to the study.

Oswald was on the phone and when he saw me, he said, “I’ll get back to you when I learn more. Yes. Bye.”

“Hey, Oswald.”

“Hello,” he said, rather flirt-deficient.

“I haven’t remembered anything yet. What exactly is the range of time for this kind of memory loss?”

He hesitated for worrisome seconds. “At first I thought that you had transient global amnesia, but it’s possible that you have dissociative amnesia as a result of emotional trauma.”

“I’m badly dressed, but not traumatized. Why have you abandoned the injury theory so quickly?” I felt the back of my head again. “I could have internal hemorrhaging, or maybe a weevil is eating its way through my brain.”

“If you had taken any serious courses in college, you wouldn’t be bringing up brain-eating weevil theories.”

“Spoken like someone who couldn’t get past the first chapter of Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” I snipped. “What happened to your bedside manner?”

“I’m sorry, Mil. I’m under some pressure today, and I’m having a problem handling this.”

“Apology accepted. So what’s stressing you out?”

“Besides your condition? My grandfather is visiting. He’s out sightseeing now,” he said. “But don’t worry about that. I got in touch with a psychiatrist through a, um, professional association. She was visiting her folks in Seattle and hopped on the first flight down. She’ll be here soon.”