The name felt wrong in her mouth. It had always felt slightly wrong, and she was only now allowing herself to say so.
"Why can't I remember?" Her brow pulled together, not with confusion exactly, but with the focused, frustrated intensity of a woman pushing hard against a locked door.
"Why can't I remember who I am?" She took a step toward him, and her eyes did not leave his face.
"You are not my husband."
She said it the way verdicts are delivered. Final. Unappealable.
"And you are certainly not the father of my sons."
Her voice cracked on the last word, just slightly, just at the very edge, and it was the only moment in the entire exchange where the fear showed through the fury. Not fear of him. Fear for them.
For the boys she could feel the shape of even when she couldn't see their faces clearly, whose existence pulled at something so deep inside her that no amount of fog or drugs or carefully constructed lies had been able to reach it and put it out.
