A few hours until Lily would arrive, and I was expected to hold a proper conversation with her, my partner. Thinking of her that way felt odd. What would I do when she arrived? Give her a hug? A kiss? If it was the latter, on the cheek or the lips? Or should I be formal and shake her hand? Her not coming until the morning was a good thing after all because I needed more time, too. The situation was bizarre enough, but what compounded it further was the fact I found Lily attractive. Exceedingly so. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise seeing as we were a couple, but realizing we’d been together—including intimately—and I had no recollection of her, made me feel a combination of angry and helpless, anxious and sad. I wondered what she’d seen in me when we met, what I’d been like as a boyfriend. Had I been as foul-tempered with her as I was with Maya? The thought made me shudder and I added the question to my growing list and included another: Why did she want to have anything to do with me now, considering my lies?

I wondered if I should’ve been writing this stuff down in case my memory morphed into even more of an unpredictable animal. I clenched my jaw tight, squeezed my eyes shut. Dr. Adler would give me the results of the second batch of blood tests soon, and it would’ve been a lie to say I wasn’t worried. What if there really was something more wrong with me? What if my amnesia had less to do with whatever happened on the beach that night and more with a cancerous tumor eating away at my brain? I flopped around in bed for another while before giving up, but trying to ignore everything wrong with the inside of my head became impossible.

The house was quiet—I’d heard Maya go to bed a while ago—and I sneaked past her bedroom and down the stairs, avoiding the third one from the top because I now knew it creaked. Maya had told me how she’d figured it out the first time she and Ophelia stayed in the house, when she’d sneaked down to the kitchen for a midnight snack. My dad had heard footfalls, and when he’d found Maya with her nose buried in the fridge, he’d made her a giant hot chocolate complete with sprinkles and marshmallows, and two slices of peanut butter toast.

“I loved your dad,” she’d said. “He was the dad I’d dreamed about when I was a kid. Our family was perfect. It was everything I’d ever wanted.”