Last Summer(68)

“Do you love him?” he asks, his voice flat.

Her head snaps up. “No!”

“Did you sleep with him?”

Ella opens her mouth to object. But the denial falls flat on her tongue. She looks down at her lap. “I thought it would trigger my memories.” Half truth. The last thing she wants Damien to hear is how she couldn’t resist consoling Nathan. She couldn’t resist him.

Damien taps the chair with his index finger. Ella glances back up at him and he sighs heavily. “That’s on me. I should have told you about him. I shouldn’t have—” He plucks at a loose thread on the chair’s arm.

“You shouldn’t have what?”

He smooths the suede fabric where he plucked off the thread. “I shouldn’t have listened to you.”

“Me? About what?”

“At the hospital. I promised that no matter how often you asked or how difficult it would be not to say anything, that I wouldn’t tell you what happened. You made me promise to lie to you if I had to. Throw you off course when I needed to, because you knew you would ask questions. I agreed to do whatever it took so that you and I could start over. Pretend that the seven months before the accident never happened.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your memory loss. It’s intentional. You did it to yourself.”

Ella’s mouth falls open for a beat. She then laughs, tossing her head back. “You aren’t serious?” she says when she can get the words out.

“I’m dead serious.” He doesn’t smile.

Ella stops laughing. “Impossible.” She did her research on selective memory loss after Dr. Allington’s diagnosis. Motivated forgetting, the purposeful repression of memories on a conscious level, is highly questionable. It’s a theory. Unproven, from what Ella read. There is still much scientists and psychologists don’t understand when it comes to memories.

Ella slides off the bed and walks to their closet.

“What’re you doing?” Damien asks.

“Getting dressed.” She isn’t going to sit and listen to this nonsense. The nerve of him to blame her. He’s the one who’s avoided talking about the accident and Simon. If Damien can’t own the reasons for his silence, she doesn’t want any part of this conversation.

She yanks on panties and yoga pants, straps on a sports bra, and tugs on a tank top. Marlene should have an afternoon hot yoga class on today’s schedule at her studio. Ella needs to get out of the house and sweat out her angst.

After brushing her teeth and twisting her hair into a messy bun, she returns. Damien hasn’t moved.

“I’m going to make coffee. When I get back, I expect the truth from you, not this crap about intentional memory loss.”

His jaw ticks. “I am telling the truth.”

“Do you hear yourself? Do you seriously expect me to believe I chose to forget our baby?”

“You weren’t supposed to forget Simon.”

She goes cold. He said the same thing to her in the hospital. Ella remembers that. She remembers his anger. He didn’t believe her then. He thought she was pretending.

“Last summer, you interviewed an actress named Amira Silvers. For whatever reason, the article didn’t go to print. But she wanted to forget something that happened when she was a kid and had found a doctor who was helping her suppress the memories. Dr. Irwin Whitely is a cognitive scientist doing cutting-edge research in the areas of memory control and motivated forgetting. You approached him to get his story. You wanted to write a feature on his groundbreaking research. You interviewed him last August in Reno.”

Reno. She ran into Nathan in Reno. But that was in October.

“Show me this doctor,” she demands.

Damien stands and retrieves his phone from his back pocket. He brings up the website to Dr. Whitely’s lab and gives Ella his phone.

Ella skims through the site’s pages, speed-reading sections of Dr. Whitely’s research. The lab is a neuroscience research center focused on studying the mechanisms that underlie memory control. Most people, especially as they age, want to improve their ability to retain and retrieve memories. But this facility, with the use of advanced techniques and a diagnostic approach, doesn’t just center on improving the ability to retrieve memories. It aims to control the retrieval process, training individuals to consciously and deliberately do the opposite of retrieving memories. It rewires the brain to block specific memories, on purpose, at the individual’s will. The lab claims that once the mind has been conditioned to intervene in the memory retrieval process, which takes multiple sessions, all an individual would need to do to consciously repress a person or event from memory is to apply a string of unique code, a formula of words, that has been programmed into the brain. The same process works to reverse the effects.

“Did this guy do something to me?” Ella asks, returning his phone.

“Dr. Whitely? You agreed to be one of his test subjects. I don’t think you intentionally set out to forget anything specific, it was just research on your part. You wanted a better understanding of his methods. Twice a week for two and a half months, you drove to Reno. He taught you how to suppress specific memories about someone you know or something that happened to you. The theory behind it is that by virtually wiping someone from your mind, you wipe out everything associated with that person. You told me he intends to use his research as therapy for people who were abused as kids. They could forget what happened to them. After we lost Simon, you told me in the hospital that Dr. Whitely had given you the tools to forget everything that happened, and you wanted to forget Nathan specifically. For the sake of us, I agreed to help you.”