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But she shook her head, which had him feeling as though his insides were wedged open.
“I’m your husband. Rafael.” Was he missing something in his own drug-addled state? Surely, she couldn’t have forgotten him. Them.
She only stared at him blankly.
Through his shock, he realized her parents were pressuring her to come home with them.
“No.” It didn’t matter whether Alexandra knew him or them or herself. He knew she would never forgive him if he let them take custody of her. He would never forgive himself. “Alexandra is my wife. She comes home with me.”
What have I done? Sasha wondered as they left the hospital for their private jet a few days later.
Right up until she was climbing into the car, her parents had kept up their pressure for her to go back to America with them. It had only fueled her ruse that she didn’t recognize them. She knew it was childish. Unethical. Cruel, even, especially to Rafael.
But she was angry with him, too. All she could think about what how truly degrading it had felt when he had laughed—laughed—at her declaring her love for him. Why did she have to love him at all, especially this hard? Why?
“Why” didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to let him hold it over her. If she didn’t remember saying it, it hadn’t happened. Not for her.
Letting go of her memory, of her history, was enormously freeing. It allowed her to put down the burden of being Alexandra and say what was really on her mind. When her mother had noticed her broken nails and suggested a manicure, Sasha had turned up her nose.
“I don’t like false nails.” She didn’t like a lot of things, especially criticism from her mother.
“That’s not a flattering style,” Winnie said when Sasha gathered her hair into a half topknot.
“It’s comfortable,” she said blandly, then told the nurse she was done with visitors for the day, forcing them to be shooed out.
Without the guilt of her past as a pressure point, Humbolt was toothless, too.
“You’re hurting your mother’s feelings by refusing to come home with us,” he said the next day, when her mother stepped out of the room to fetch coffee.
“Oh? Winnie said she wants me to stay with you because she’s afraid Rafael will evict you if I don’t remember you, and that you have nowhere else to go. Is that true, Anson?” she asked with baffled curiosity. “Do you not have money of your own?” She knew he didn’t.
She took him aback using his first name. He stood taller and erased her words with a wave of his hand. “No, no. She wants to look after you because she cares about you.”
“So you do have somewhere to go. Because I understand all the properties are actually mine.”
“Listen, girlie. Don’t try to play hardball with me.” He came closer to the bed.
She picked up the call button.
His mouth tightened. Aside from taking a rough grip on her arm or other manhandling like that, he’d never been outwardly violent, but he loved to belittle her. Hundreds of times, he had turned her insides to stone with a contemptuous glower like the one he wore now.
For once, she truly felt impervious to it.
“There are things I could bring up that you’d rather weren’t made public,” he warned. “Things that would send your husband running and ruin your life.”
“But I would still have my fortune,” she clarified, tilting her head in thought. “And since I’ve already forgotten the life I had, it doesn’t matter if you burn it down. I’ll see how it goes with my husband. If things don’t work out, I’ll need my house. You should start making other arrangements.”
He was not happy with her inability to be intimidated. He tried to sic her mother on her and Winnie brought to bear some of her best guilt-saturated manipulation, but a lack of memory served Sasha there, too.
“I know I should feel obligated, but I don’t.”
She refused to apologize for her lack of sympathy. The only thing she was sorry for was allowing Humbolt to bully her as long as he had. When they left Winnie and Anson on the sidewalk in Rome, Sasha was confident it would be the last time she ever spoke to them.
Leaving her parents in the dust seemed to be the impetus in Rafael’s decision to head back to Athens, despite being told he would need another surgery.
Sasha should have stayed in hospital herself. She was mostly uninjured, but persistent headaches ran the gamut from dull to debilitating. The doctor said she should expect that to continue for weeks, possibly months, but hoped they would dwindle over time, provided she got plenty of rest and gave herself time to heal.
Rafael was limping short distances on crutches, but should be using a wheelchair. Too much stress on his forearm could pop his stitches, but she would love to meet the person who successfully told Rafael he wasn’t allowed to do something.
