My Husband Says I Died Three Years Ago
A TaleDale Story · Story concept by Nora Ashwick
Julian locked his phone and put it in his pocket.
“Show me again.”
“Elena—”
“You don’t get to use my name and hide hers.”
The doctor moved between us. “Your memories may be unreliable. Emotional agitation could trigger another episode.”
“Another?”
Neither man answered.
I looked at the locked door, the silent call button, and the absence of anything sharp or breakable. This was not a recovery room. It was a room designed to contain someone politely.
“How long have I been awake before today?”
The doctor’s pause was enough.
“Six times,” Julian said. “Never longer than a few minutes. You screamed. Once you tried to climb through that window.”
“Why don’t I remember?”
“Dr. Bell sedated you.”
Dr. Bell gave him a warning look.
“And you allowed it?” I asked.
Julian’s eyes dropped to my bare hand. “The first time you woke, you tried to strangle me.”
I expected fear. Instead, something inside me recognized the information and stayed calm.
That frightened me more.
I pulled the IV from my arm. Dr. Bell reached for me, but I stepped back.
“Take me to my grave.”
“Absolutely not,” he said.
“Then I start screaming. Someone will eventually come.”
“This wing is empty.”
“That sounded less reassuring than you intended.”
Julian studied me with the exhausted concentration of a man approaching a bomb. “If I take you, will you come back without running?”
“No.”
Something almost like a smile touched his mouth. It disappeared before I could decide whether I had imagined it.
An hour later, I sat in the back of Julian’s car wearing borrowed clothes and no shoes. Dr. Bell had objected until Julian signed a form accepting responsibility. The word responsibility made them both look uncomfortable.
We drove through Grayhaven beneath a low white sky. The bakery where Julian bought Sunday bread was now a pharmacy. Our favorite theater had become luxury apartments. Every changed storefront stole another piece of my life.
“Where is our house?” I asked.
“I sold it.”
“My mother?”
“Still alive.”
“Does she know?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He tightened both hands around the wheel. “Because if anyone learns you’re alive, the person who tried to kill you may try again.”
“You said it was an accident.”
“The certificate says accident.”
“And what do you say?”
He took the road toward St. Orison Cemetery without answering.
We passed the street where we had lived. Julian tried to keep looking ahead, but I saw the hesitation in his hands.
“Slow down.”
“We don’t have time.”
“You had three years. Give me ten seconds.”
The house was blue now. A child’s bicycle lay on the lawn. Someone had removed the rosebushes I planted after our wedding. In the upstairs window, a woman lifted a baby from a crib.
I waited for grief and felt only recognition without ownership, as if viewing a set built from photographs.
“What did I keep in the kitchen drawer beside the stove?” Julian asked suddenly.
“Takeout menus, birthday candles, and the screwdriver you were always losing.”
“What was painted beneath the blue wallpaper in our bedroom?”
“Yellow birds. We found them when the pipe burst.”
His face tightened. Those were not facts Anna Cross could have learned from a newspaper.
“You believe me,” I said.
“I believe you have her memories.”
That was not the same thing.
It meant he believed the impossible part while still doubting the woman standing beside him.
My grave stood beneath an elm tree on a hill overlooking the river. The stone was black granite, polished enough to reflect me.
ELENA ROSE MERCER.
BELOVED DAUGHTER. BELOVED WIFE.
My knees weakened.
Someone had left white lilies in a glass vase. They were fresh. A folded note rested between the stems.
I reached for it.
Julian caught my wrist. “Don’t.”
“Why?”
“Those are replaced every Thursday.”
“By whom?”
Gravel shifted behind us.
A woman stood ten yards away holding another bundle of lilies.
For a moment, my mind refused to arrange what my eyes were seeing. She had my dark hair, cut shorter. My narrow chin. The small uneven lift at the left corner of my mouth. Even the faint white scar above my eyebrow was there.
She dropped the flowers.
Julian moved in front of me.
“Celeste,” he said.
The woman wearing my face stared past him. Her skin lost color.
“You said she would never wake up.”
I stepped around Julian. “Who am I?”
Celeste’s fear hardened into calculation. She pulled out her phone.
“Don’t,” Julian warned.
She was already dialing.
“There’s a woman at Elena’s grave,” she said when someone answered. “It’s Anna Cross. She found us again.”
Again.
The word struck harder than the sight of my own face.
Celeste looked directly at me and continued, “Send the police before she hurts my husband.”
Then she smiled with my mouth.
“You should have stayed asleep, Anna.”