This. This was what I needed to do first. I got out of my car and went inside the Silver Shores Assisted Living facility.

Damian’s mom met me at the door. Her hair was cut short, a dirty blonde similar to Damian’s when we’d first started dating. She had the same angular, long face, and the same blue eyes. She watched me cautiously, which stopped me in my tracks.

Jesus.

Damian had lost some of his looks as the dementia progressed. He’d lost the muscle definition, and the freshness of youth I hadn’t started to appreciate until later in life. His hair was greasy half the time, and uncombed the other.

But seeing his mother now, a wave of memories flooded me.

“Hi. I’m Damian, and I suck at hitting on women, but I still wanted to come over and try with you. So consider this my lame pick-up line.” He had smiled, holding his hand out in the middle of a busy bar, as if we were meeting in a boardroom.

His eyes had twinkled.

Sandy brown hair in a crew cut, a golden tan from the summer months, and a form that showed he lifted weights on the regular—I’d been taken aback. Not by him, not by the simple pick-up line, but because he’d laughed after he held his hand out.

That laugh.

I heard it again now. Like an intoxicating bell, light and breezy, and like sunshine after enduring four months of a gloomy winter.

I breathed in the memory and blinked back tears, because I missed him.

“I’m going to warn you.” He’d smiled down at me on our first date. “You’re going to fall in love with me.”

“I am, huh?”

“I’m scarily intoxicating. You’ll see.” He’d winked before coming around to open my door for me.

A year into our relationship he’d told me, “I will never hurt you. I will love you forever. You and me, we’ll conquer the world.”

“Charlie?”

Brenda approached, her hands coming out of her pockets. She jerked forward, as if unsure then suddenly going for it. This wasn’t the Brenda I remembered. She’d been smooth and confident when Damian and I first started dating. There’d always been a sadness about her, and Damian had pulled away from her when his first symptoms started. When she finally learned the truth, she’d just seemed resigned, like she knew that phone call was going to come one day.

Thinking on it now, she probably had.

“Hi. Yeah. Wow.” I fitted my hand in hers, feeling her shaking, just like me.

She laughed, finishing my thought. “Long time, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Yeah. I sighed.

We were in a nursing home. He was too young to be here.

“Damian mentioned you the other day.”

This was so fucking painful. My throat swelled. “Yeah?”

He could still remember me?