The Things We Keep(91)

The little boy slides off Anna’s lap. After kissing Anna’s forehead, Jack guides his son out of the room by the shoulders. Peter follows close behind.

When they are gone, I enter. “Hello,” I say.

Anna blinks up at me.

I scan her face for recognition, but I don’t find it. “I’m Eve. This is Angus.”

“Is it breakfast time?”

I have no idea if she recognizes me or associates me with cooking or what. In any case, it’s two thirty in the afternoon, so breakfast isn’t likely. “Not yet,” I say. “But I can get you a cinnamon bun, if you like.”

“No.” She looks at Luke and suddenly, inexplicably, she breaks into a smile. “Would you like a cinnamon bun?”

He shakes his head, smiling back.

She’s changed, even in the few months since I left. She looks older. Her face is more vacant and her shoulders have taken on a slight hunch. Still, there is a beauty to her. I think back to the day I met her, on the grass in the garden. “Help me,” she’d said. I hope, in some way, I did.

When Anna looks back at me, her expression is puzzled. I can almost hear her unspoken question. When did you get here? She cocks her head, perhaps searching for the information that her brain refuses to give her.

Instead of filling her in, reminding her of my name, I stay silent. Deep down, selfishly, I want the moment of recognition.

“Oh,” she says finally. “Is it breakfast time?”

We stay for fifteen minutes. And when we say our good-byes, Anna barely notices.

“Are you sad?” Angus asks me in the foyer. His face is concerned. “That she didn’t remember you?”

“No,” I say. “Why would I be sad? Anna and Luke got what they wanted—they’ll be together till the end.” I take Angus’s hand and lead him toward the door. “If only everyone could be so lucky.”





50

Anna

Six months ago …

I think I’m in a garden. It’s warm and bright and there’s a pattern of light on the green spike-thingies at my feet. There is a man next to me. A young guy. He smiles a little, so I smile back. It makes me feel happy.

And just like that, a memory is coming at me. Sweeping through my mind and collapsing every part of my brain until there’s nothing but a cloud of images. I’m as powerless to stop these visions as I am to, uh … what’s the word, conjure?… them up. I’m in bed. This man and I lie tangled in each other. It’s new, our relationship, maybe our first time together. He is smiling and I am happy.

“P-promise me we’ll be together in the end,” he says. “No switching a button, no ending it. Promise?”

I groan, but his face is determined. There’s no arguing.

“Fine,” I say.

“Say … it.”

I roll my eyes. “I promise. We’ll be together in the end. Batshit crazy. And together. I promise.”

I swim out of the memory, and when I do, the man—Luke—is still smiling. I remember, I want to tell him. But for how long? If the memory starts in clouds, it finishes off a precipice, gone into blackness. This is what terrifies me.

Suddenly, a woman appears in front of me, planting a colorful thing on my lap. She smells of cream and cake. “You dropped this,” she says.

I don’t think I know this woman, but she has kind eyes. She’s waiting for me to say something, but my mind is somewhere else. I need to tell someone something before the memory goes. Maybe this woman? Maybe she can help me keep my promise to Luke? But my thoughts come slowly, and before I can ask her, she is removing her hand from my lap.

I lunge forward and clasp on to it.

“Oh.” The woman pulls back, but I just hold her tighter. In a minute, the memory will be gone, and who knows when it will be back? It may never come back. “I didn’t mean to alarm you,” she says, “I … I just didn’t want you to lose your lovely scarf.”

“Please,” I say. “Help me.”

The woman’s eyes grow round. There’s something about her. Do I know this woman? Was she once my friend? She looks like a friend.

“What did you say? Anna?”

Anna. She knows my name. I must know her. She will help me. I know she will.

The woman is waiting for a reply, but suddenly, I don’t remember the question. It makes me feel nervous, and I look away from her, at the smiling man beside me. Immediately, I feel better.

The woman leaves, and I keep looking at the man. As long as I stick with him, I decide, things will be all right.





Acknowledgments

As always, thank you to my editor, Jennifer Enderlin, for knowing how to take my words and ideas and shape them into something resembling a book. Thank you also to the talented and hardworking team at St. Martin’s Press who, I suspect, love books even more than I do (and that is saying something). To my publishers around the world, particularly Haylee Nash and Alex Lloyd at Pan Macmillan Australia, thank you for all that you do. As an aspiring author I used to dream about having a team of people who believed in my book, and now it’s fair to say I have the “dream team.”

To my agent and friend Rob Weisbach, thank you for tirelessly advocating for me and, more important, for showing me where to spot celebrities in L.A. (Next time I’m not leaving until I meet Kevin Spacey.)