My Ex-Fiancé's Memory Game novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Memory Game
Carrying a positive pregnancy test, Hazel overhears her "amnesiac" fiancé bragging that he faked it to sleep with ten more women; she drops her ring in his drink in front of his friends and calls the ransom negotiator, who has been waiting for her call.
Two days before our wedding, my fiancé was kidnapped on his way to pick up my dress.
Three days later he came home alive, and he didn't know who I was.
Every time anyone said the word "wedding" around him, Carter fainted.
The ER doctor called it trauma-related amnesia.
I believed him.
I'm a neuropsychologist. I test memory for a living. I have sat across a table from hundreds of people who lost pieces of their lives, and I know what it looks like.
I looked at Carter's scores and I cried in the hospital bathroom, because they were real.
That was six weeks ago.
This morning I peed on a stick in the clinic restroom between patients, and two pink lines came up.
I sat on the closed lid and laughed with both hands over my mouth.
Polly, our research nurse, banged on the door. "Did you die in there? Your two o'clock is eating all my granola bars."
I opened the door and held the stick up, and she screamed loud enough to bring the clinic director out of his office.
Seven weeks.
The baby was older than his amnesia.
I thought, maybe this is the thing. Maybe this brings him back.
His mother said he was at the club, resting after his tennis therapy.
So at four o'clock on a Friday I drove out to Gladwyne with the test in a sandwich bag in my purse.
The girl at the front desk knew me.
Everyone at the club knew me. My name was still on the calligraphy cards for a wedding that never happened.
"He's in the grill room, Miss Forbes," she said, and gave me the tight little smile people had been giving me for six weeks.
The grill room is men only after three. It's the kind of rule nobody enforces and nobody breaks.
I stopped outside the swinging door to fix my hair.
That's when I heard him laugh.
Not the careful, confused laugh he'd been using with me. His real one.
"You really faked the whole memory thing to get out of the wedding?" someone said.
That was Tripp. Carter's best friend since they were fourteen.
Glass clinked.
"I love Hazel," Carter said. "I do. I'm only lying to her this once. Ten more women, then I marry her."
The whole table laughed.
I put my hand flat on the door.
"Ten?" Tripp said. "Ten's nothing. Keep it going a year, man. It's not like she's going to marry anybody else. She's Hazel."
I knew that tone.
It was the one they used about my glasses and my clinic job and my sensible shoes.
Carter's voice went cold and quick.
"I can't stand watching her mope for a whole year. It's depressing."
Then he snapped his fingers. I heard it.
"Speaking of which. Why haven't you found me anybody new yet? I want sweet-looking girls who know what they're doing. One every three days. And none of it pushes back my wedding with Hazel."
Somebody whistled.
My fingers went numb against the wood.
I thought of every dinner for two years where I'd talked about my work.
The word lists. The story recall. The figure you copy and then draw again from memory twenty minutes later.
He used to ask such good questions.
I'd thought he was interested in me.
I took my phone out of my purse, opened the voice recorder and held it up to the gap in the door.
"Honestly," Carter said, "the fainting is the best part. Mom says 'wedding,' I go down like a sack of flour, and everybody brings me soup."
They laughed for a long time.
I let them finish.
Then I pushed the door open and walked in.
Four men at a round table by the window. Club ties. Short glasses of something brown.
Tripp saw me first. His face went slack.
Carter had his back to me.
"What?" he said, still smiling. "What's wrong with you?"
Then he turned around.
I watched him do the math.
I watched him decide whether to faint.
"Don't," I said. "You'll spill your drink."
Nobody at the table moved.
A waiter by the bar stopped polishing a glass.
I walked over to Carter and held up my left hand.
The ring was two carats, an oval. His grandmother's setting. He'd proposed on the Strawberry Mansion Bridge at sunset with a violinist he couldn't afford.
I'd paid the violinist later. I found the invoice.
I pulled the ring off.
"Hazel," Carter said, very gently, like he was talking to a patient. "Sweetheart, I don't know what you think you heard."
"You don't know a lot of things lately."
I dropped the ring into his whiskey.
It hit the ice with a little click and sank.
One of the men at the table actually snorted.
Carter stared at the glass.
"I'll help you with the rest," I said. "You can forget me for real now. It'll be good practice."
"Hazel, wait. Hazy."
He hadn't called me Hazy in six weeks.
He'd forgotten that name along with everything else.
I turned around and walked out past the waiter, past the girl at the desk, past the calligraphy cards, and into the heat of the parking lot.
I didn't run.
I made it all the way to my car before my hands started to shake.
The sandwich bag with the test was still in my purse.
I sat in the driver's seat with the engine off and the windows up and thought about the kidnapping.
The phone call to my father's house in Chestnut Hill. The voice.
Two million dollars in cash in a gym bag.
My father counted it himself on the dining room table and didn't sleep for three nights.
And the big quiet man from the insurance company's security firm, sitting at that same table, saying one thing over and over that nobody wanted to hear.
They never asked for proof of life.
He'd left his card on the sideboard on the last day.
I had put it in my wallet without knowing why.
I took it out now.
Sam Rooney. Kidnap and ransom consultant.
He answered on the second ring.
"Rooney."
"This is Hazel Forbes," I said. "The kidnappers. I know who they are."
There was a short silence on the line.
Then I heard a chair creak.
"I know, Miss Forbes," he said. "I've been waiting six weeks for you to call."
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