‘I would never have stopped trying, I just wouldn’t have,’ I say, almost to myself. I draw in a deep breath and hold it, as if fortifying myself for battle. ‘Well, if that’s true, then I am glad I had this accident because clearly I had lost my mind.’
The gaps in my memory are still extensive but I am undeterred – I am still certain of the love I have for her. Whatever happened between us, I refuse to entertain the idea that I cannot trust that love.
Molly stares at me. ‘Leo,’ she says, frowning, ‘What are you saying?’
‘If this is true, we have to fix it.’
‘You can’t possibly know that you want that.’
‘The only thing I know is that I love you, and I know that you love me too. Surely everything else is just noise?’
‘I might have said that too – once,’ Molly murmurs, ‘Back when you proposed, I remember thinking that life might be hard for us sometimes, but we’d always have each other. It just isn’t that simple.’
‘I’m afraid you are going to have to convince me of that, Molly,’ I say and I shake my head, but then a new thought strikes me – the one thing that could change everything. I lean away from her a little, and ask hesitantly, ‘Do you still love me?’
‘I told you I do five minutes ago. I will always love you, Leo.’
‘Then has it really become so bad that you would give up on us?’
‘Can you remember any of it?’ she asks me, her voice a bare whisper. ‘Is any of this ringing any bells?’ With some difficulty I drag my gaze away from her to stare at the polished floorboards. I concentrate as hard as I can, but succeed only in giving myself a headache. My every heartbeat triggers pain in my skull, and but for the fact that this is such a huge mess, I might have tried to put a pause on the conversation. But this did not seem like the kind of thing I could just walk away from and resume later after some painkillers.
‘I can’t imagine a time when you weren’t a revelation to me,’ I say, when my memory remains stubbornly blank. I think that the most recent memory I now hold is the proposal. We’d had squabbles when we were dating – every couple does – but the good times by far outweighed the bad. ‘I can’t even conceptualise how bad things must have been for me to walk away from you.’
‘But you were walking away from me even when we were dating,’ she says, and there’s a barely restrained anger to her words. ‘Every time you left for the field, every juicy story that you flew out to write, that was the start of where we wound up.’
‘Are you trying to tell me that this was entirely my fault?’ And although I’m telling her the truth and I do not remember a single thing of this, I know this defensiveness. I might not remember the incidents, but the urge to come back at her is strong – I have clearly done this a million times.
Is that what this came down to – did she try to force me to leave a job that I loved, and did I choose it over her? I find it hard to believe she would ever make me choose – but I also cannot be sure of what choice I would have made if she had.
‘Being married is a lot harder than we thought it was going to be,’ Molly murmurs.
‘You mean it’s a lot harder to be married to me than you thought it would be?’ I say. I truly want nothing more than to sort this out right now and earn back the sparkling affection in her eyes but I’m still defensive, and as she recognises that I see Molly’s eyes cloud over.
‘We both made mistakes.’
‘Do you want to fix things?’
‘I don’t know,’ she admits, and my heart sinks. ‘Since you woke up, I have had glimpses of the way it used to be. If we could be like that… If that is still who we are, then of course I want that.’
‘But…’ I can hear the word, even though she hasn’t said it.
‘But, Leo,’ she gives me a pleading and watery smile then shakes her head, ‘you don’t want this. As soon as your memory comes back, as soon as your legs are working again, all you are going to want to do is go back to work. And as soon as you go back into the field, we will be right back where we started.’
‘Love, I can see that at least part of the problem was how much I’d been working. Obviously I’m going to be here, in Sydney, not working… for a while anyway. Do you think we could really focus on us while I’m here recovering? I want us to work, Molly. Can we work at this together?’
‘So what does that look like?’ She raises her eyebrows at me in a gentle challenge. ‘How do you propose we “work at this”?’
‘We talk,’ I say, and when she grimaces, I ask hesitantly, ‘You don’t think that would work?’
She smiles sadly at me. ‘I have no idea – we’ve never really tried it. We seemed to skip straight to yelling.’
I draw in a deep breath. ‘So from today, we do things differently – we don’t yell, we talk instead.’ I exhale, and I offer her what I hope is a reassuring smile. ‘We can fix this; I know we can.’
‘You are so innocent without your memories, Leo,’ she whispers.