Before I can reach my phone, Lucy snatches it up, holding it out of my reach. “No. I’m not going to let you mess this up for yourself. You can’t call Harry. I won’t let you make the biggest mistake of your life.”
Before I can hear my reply, the dressing room fades away to white, and suddenly, I’m back on the street again, my fingers wrapped around Ziggy’s leash. Lucy is next to me, back in her work clothes rather than the purple frock, and she’s shaking my shoulder.
“Tess!” Her green eyes are wide. “Tess, are you okay?”
I blink at her. I open my mouth but it takes another few seconds for me to get out any words. “What happened?”
“You… you just…” Lucy chews on her lower lip. “You zoned out for like ten seconds. I think it was a seizure.”
I almost drop Ziggy’s leash. “A seizure?”
“You have them sometimes.” She shrugs like me having a seizure is no big deal. “I would have thought you just zoned out a bit, but you had one once while Graham was around and he told me that’s what it was.”
“Does this happen to me a lot?”
She nods. “A fair amount. But I’ve never seen it happen to you while we were walking. Are you okay?”
I feel dizzy, but otherwise not too bad. But then I attempt to take a step and my knees wobble. “Maybe we should head home.”
“Of course.” She rubs my shoulder. “Let’s get you home right away.”
As we continue our circle around the park in the direction of my house, I noticed that the park has a dog park inside of it. As I look at the dog park, I get this strange feeling, like a snapshot of a memory.
Did something happen inside that dog park?
“Lucy,” I say. “Do I ever take Ziggy to the dog park?”
Her brow wrinkles. “I think so. Why?”
I stare at that dog park, imagining Ziggy bounding through the dirt on the ground. Something happened in this dog park. But I can’t quite retrieve the memory. It’s so frustrating.
The last thing I remember before this morning was going to sleep next to Harry, but that was years ago. Nearly a decade of memories have somehow just vanished. But have they vanished? Or are they just below the surface, waiting to be retrieved?
Chapter 31
Lucy decides to stay for dinner. Camila has made us steaks with a side of mashed potatoes and asparagus. Graham and I are seated across from each other, and Lucy is between us, at the head of the table.
“Graham,” Lucy says, “did you have a chance to see The Ivory Castle?”
Graham’s eyes light up. “I did. It was great, wasn’t it? A haunting performance by Higgins.”
I slice into the filet mignon Camila has placed on my plate. She said that they were cooked medium rare, but as the butter knife slices through the meat, it looks much closer to rare. It’s outright bloody. But Lucy and Graham don’t seem bothered by it. Maybe Graham likes his steak rare. How would I know—this morning, I couldn’t have even told you his name.
“I thought Charlie Devine was amazing as Roger,” Lucy says. “He is such a great actor.”
“It’s a shame about his personal life,” Graham says.
Lucy giggles. “Do you believe those rumors?”
“Hard not to…”
The two of them chatter on about this actor Charlie Devine, who I never even heard of, and some rumor about him and some other actress I also never heard of. I don’t have any hope of participating in this conversation. So I mostly focus on eating my mashed potatoes and asparagus. And also, eating the part of my steak that isn’t still mooing. Mostly the edges.
“Camila is a gem,” Lucy comments as she nibbles on a stalk of asparagus. “Every time I’ve eaten here, I feel like I’m at a Michelin star restaurant.”
“I know.” Graham sips from the glass of wine he poured for himself. He’s the only one drinking alcohol—Lucy and I are just having water. “She’s worth her weight in gold. Don’t you think so, Tess?”
Those are the first words he said to me since I sat down. And he’s only including me to be nice. How would I know how good Camila is? I just met her this morning. “Yes…”
“If not for her,” Graham continues, “Tess probably would have set the house on fire by now.”
Lucy laughs, but I don’t appreciate the joke. “No, I wouldn’t,” I protest.
Graham chuckles. “Come on.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I shoot back. “I would be fine by myself here all day. I wouldn’t set fire to anything. I would be fine.”
“Right. Sure. You’d be fine.”
I don’t appreciate the sarcasm in his voice. “What do you think I’m going to do? I might not remember yesterday, but I know how to work a stove. I know how to walk Ziggy around the block. You really think I can’t be by myself?”
“No,” Graham says patiently. “I don’t think that you can’t be by yourself. I know you can’t be by yourself.”
I look over at Lucy for help. She has made herself busy spearing one of the chunks of steak that has been shredded by the butter knife. Presumably, I am not to be trusted around steak knives.
“Lucy,” I say. “You spent the entire afternoon with me. Do you think I would do something dangerous?”
Lucy sighs and puts down her fork. She reaches for my hand across the table. “Tess,” she says. “What’s the difference, really? Camila is amazing. Is it so horrible to have her around?”
I think about the locks on the front and back doors. The ones trapping me inside my own house. Then I think about the ten seconds when I was walking Ziggy, and my brain shut down and went to a completely different place. A “seizure.” My skin starts to crawl and I snatch my hand out from underneath Lucy’s.
“This wine is unbelievable.” Graham swishes the red wine around in his glass, apparently done with this line of conversation. “I got it at Martha’s Vineyard.”
I think of the Cabernet, which was the last wine I remember drinking before this happened to me. It was the most expensive bottle of wine I’d ever had, but I suspect it was far cheaper than whatever Graham is drinking now.
“It has an earthy aroma, almost smoky,” he says. “And it has a soft, smooth mouth feel.”