Chapter 13

Shawn

Evelyn follows me into the garage.

As I stand there looking around, she goes straight to a stack of boxes and bins in the right corner. She stands there for a split second, looking at it all until she finds the box she recognizes she wants.

The box she starts to pull out has my name scrawled on the side in big black letters.

A mixture of sorrow, pleasure, and surprise rises up inside me.

She could have thrown all my stuff out, but she didn’t. Yet she boxed it all up to sit in a closet out of sight and out of mind.

“How about I take it inside?”

Back in the house, I take it into the room, with Evelyn following. After I’ve put it on the bed, she comes up beside me and starts to open it.

“Here you go,” she says. “These used to be yours, and I don’t see why they wouldn’t fit.” She glances at me to take me in completely. “Except being a little more toned, you look the same. Definitely didn’t get fat over the years you were supposedly dead. So, you have a nice selection here, and you won’t have a problem with any of the clothes.”

I just look at her and the box of clothes. I don’t comment on her little statement of me being supposedly dead. It sounds so accusing—as if I was using it as an excuse to hide from life, or her.

I suppose she has a right to be mad, even if I do have amnesia. I’m more stuck on the fact that she kept all this stuff.

“Why did you keep it all?” I finally ask.

She stands there for a minute. At first, she looks lost, and then she looks as if she is trying to figure out how to respond.

“Honestly, I didn’t even want to box it all up. I was still clinging to the idea that it wasn’t true and that it was all a dream. But James thought it would help. He thought it would help me start to realize the reality of the situation. That you were really gone.”

She gives a low chuckle.

“Obviously, though, you aren’t gone,” she mumbles. “Everyone had accepted you were, except me.”

As she talks, my chest tightens with each word. I rub it to try to relieve the pressure.

This whole situation is fucked up. It kills me that I can’t remember anything that involved my life with this woman. But is it worse than what she had to deal with?

She remembers everything and learned that the man she thought was dead was really alive and hadn’t come home back to her until years later.

I shake my head. I can’t dwell on this shit. I can’t change what happened. All I can do right now is get dressed and go to a cake-tasting with Evelyn. A cake tasting for her wedding to another man.

I reach into the box to pull out the first shirt my hand comes in contact with. I lay the shirt down so I can remove the one I’m currently wearing. My fingers grasp the bottom and roll it up to pull it over my head.

“Shawn!” Evelyn exclaims. “There’s a bathroom you can change in. Go undress in—”

She stops speaking once I have the shirt completely off. I look at her, and she is eyeing my chest.

I look down to see what she is staring at. I realize she’s analyzing all the scars that cover me. They are wounds of war.

Over time I’ve accepted them, but they are a reminder of my traumatic injuries received on duty. I know she caught a glimpse of them last night when she came into the room while I was naked. Maybe she didn’t see them fully in the dim light.

She slowly walks towards me until she is standing a foot away from me. One of her hands lift, as if to touch me, but she stops before making contact to look up at me.

I don’t say or do anything to indicate I want to stop her from touching me. We look into each other’s eyes. She must see in my expression that I’m willing to stand here while she explores my collage of scars, because she resumes her reach.

When her skin finally makes contact with mine, I jolt slightly from the feel. She glances up at me to make sure I’m okay. I give her a slight nod to tell her to keep going.

Her delicate and soft fingers trace one scar after another. She pauses on one thick scar that resides on my right shoulder. It’s small and slightly circular but has a thick buildup of scar tissue.

“How did you get this one?” she asks.

“Gunshot wound,” I reply. “It didn’t go all the way through, and there wasn’t a doctor around or anyone who wouldn’t kill me on sight, so I had to dig it out myself. Also had to stich it up myself. That’s why it’s so raised.”

She looks stunned, but she moves on to trace a thinner scar that runs crookedly under my ribs on the left side.

“This one?” she whispers.

“Knife fight with an asshole who thought he capture me to sell off to a terrorist cell,” I explain. “Luckily, I found someone who could stich that one up for me so it doesn’t look half as bad as the other scar.”

I try to make light of it, but Evelyn still looks pained.

She asks about another scar on my left arm that was also due to a knife. That one didn’t need stitches, just a bit of cleaning and making sure it didn’t get infected while it healed—which it did, therefore leaving a scar.

Evelyn lands on a medium-sized scar that rests on my left pec.

“What happened here?”

I stare down at her hand tracing over the scar. It’s ragged and slightly white.

What the hell did happen there?

I furrow my brow. I stare at it long and hard, but no memory of how I got it comes to mind.

“Shawn? What’s wrong?” Evelyn asks, breaking me out of the trance I was in, trying to find an answer to her question about the scar.

“I don’t know,” I finally state. “I don’t remember where I got the scar from or how I got it.”

Looking at the other scars Evelyn didn’t ask about, I realize there are a handful of them that I don’t remember how I got. I remember some incidents resulting in some of the scars, but not all of them.

Shouldn’t I be able to remember? Usually, you get scars, and you remember because the pain or the incident that caused them are that memorable. But shit, I can’t remember.

My irritation grows with the realization of the areas my amnesia extends to. Only now that Evelyn is asking about each scar do I realize the extent of my memory loss. Before, I never even questioned where they came from.

“It looks like it hurt. And it’s really close to where your heart is,” Evelyn states once again, drawing me out of my own head.

I just nod.

“Maybe it’s better you don’t remember this one. All that matters is you survived and it’s healed.”

Maybe.

“I should finish getting dressed before we’re late to the cake-tasting,” I tell her.

She jerks back suddenly from me. “Right. Um, there are the clothes, and you know where the bathroom is. I’m going to go change myself.”

She leaves without a backwards glance.

Trying to get rid of the frustration over my amnesia, I get dressed quickly and wait by the front door for Evelyn.

Hopefully, the cake-tasting will go smoothly and help take my mind off everything that’s happened or been revealed since I showed up at Evelyn’s house.

Like I said before, it’s a fucking messed up situation.