“Thank you for this. I couldn’t imagine anyone better to take care of this place.”

My best friend throws me a grateful smile, then knocks at the door.

Chapter 31

CHAPTER 31

Wren

My eyes are drooping closed when a ping makes me jerk up.

There’s a new email in my inbox, and I feel too drained to actually open it. I let my head fall onto my desk in my office, letting out my thousandth sigh of the day.

That’s how it’s been for two weeks. I’ve tried to put my all into my work—one of the only things I still have—yet my focus and energy hasn’t been there. I still like what I do, but it’s like I’ve forgotten how to function.

Returning to my usual routine should’ve brought me peace, but it somehow hasn’t. In the past months, I’d gotten used to not finding all my things right where I’d left them, or not always knowing where I’d be during each hour of the day. The anxiety linked to the smallest changes in my habits had dimmed, hence the lack of relief that returning to my normal life has brought me. I don’t care about life as it used to be. I’d rather have the spontaneity I lost.

Burying myself in work has been more or less the same. While I’m trying to focus on a new client’s case, I always find my mind wandering to what’s happening at Evermore, or to what Aaron is doing. It’s almost like a disease. I can’t get rid of these thoughts. They’re invasive, and each one of them is sharp as a knife, creating tiny cuts all over my body until it feels like I’m bleeding all over.

It’s strange, really, how I never thought to protect myself.

Before, I’d wrapped my life around my diagnosis, but now that I’ve experienced living for something more, I don’t think I can appreciate my old way of existing any longer. If all my life is focused on my memory and I one day lose it, then what will I be left with? Who will I be, when I don’t know who I am and no one else does either?

That still doesn’t mean I regret what I did. Aaron is an independent variable in this. It’s not because I don’t like my life any longer that he deserves to be put back in it. That man seems to have no self-preservation instinct.

He says he wants me, but that’s because he doesn’t know what it’s like to lose someone to Alzheimer’s. He doesn’t know what being with me would entail. How could he?