Last Summer: A Novel Read online

  Watery laughter bubbled from Ella. “Happy Un-Thanksgiving.”

  Damien settled onto the love seat and patted the cushion for her to join him. He draped a blanket over their laps and his arm around her shoulders. For a short time, they drank their wine and watched the snow fall. She knew he was waiting for her to tell him why they’d never celebrate Thanksgiving, and she loved him even more for not pushing her. But she was ready to talk.

  “I don’t remember much about my parents, mostly what Aunt Kathy told me. But I do remember that they argued, a lot. Well, Mom argued. Dad just took it. Aunt Kathy said he loved my mom above anyone else and that he tried hard to keep her happy. Anyway, Mom got pregnant with me in high school. Her parents wanted her to get an abortion and threatened to donate the college tuition they’d saved for her to a charity.”

  “I take it some random charity received a hefty donation since you’re here with me.” Damien gave her shoulder a squeeze.

  “It did. And Mom made the situation worse by marrying my dad. My grandparents disowned her.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Aunt Kathy felt my mom was better off without them. They weren’t nice people. But my mom took it hard. I think she loved my dad at one time, but she definitely came to resent him.

  “I was six and Andrew four when we went to Aunt Kathy’s for Thanksgiving that year. We’d go every year. She practically raised my dad after his parents died. But that year, my parents drank all day, and so did my aunt. She passed out before we left that night; otherwise, I’d like to think she would have told my parents to spend the night.

  “We spent the day playing games and my parents at least acted civilly toward each other. I remember the five of us playing charades. That was fun. But the more they drank, the more Mom bickered. By the time we got into the car, they were both smashed and my mom was spewing such hateful things at my dad.”

  “He drove drunk with two kids in the car?” Damien asked, aghast.

  Ella nodded. “It wasn’t the first time, but that night I think he just wanted to get home and pass out so that he didn’t have to listen to my mom anymore.” She paused and gulped her wine. Liquid courage.

  Damien rubbed her back. She offered him a weak smile. “This isn’t easy.”

  “You don’t have to tell me everything. We can wait.”

  She shook her head. “No, I want to.” She sipped more wine, then set down the glass. “My mom was so mean to him, but I think my dad believed she still loved him. Either that, or he hoped that she would again one day. But—and I remember this vividly—while we were driving home, my mom shouted that she wanted a divorce. Then she said that she never did love him, even in the beginning, and that she only married him to piss off her parents. Whether it was that specifically or a culmination of her abuse, she broke him. He started crying and the car started swerving. Andrew and I were screaming. There was construction on the freeway, and to this day, I don’t know if it was an accident or if it was intentional, but he drove the car straight into the back of a parked flatbed truck. The last thing I remember is the crunch of metal and glass shattering. And the pipes on the flatbed. I remember those. They cut into the car and punched into my parents.”

  Damien looked at her, stunned. “Fuck me.”

  “Yeah, that about sums it up.”

  Damien pulled her into his arms. “I’m sorry you had to witness that.”

  “Me too. That’s why turkey makes me gag. The smell always triggers images of the wreck.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I guess it’s a good thing we aren’t planning to have kids. They’d hate not celebrating Thanksgiving.” Ella tried to joke, but it only made her sadder.

  “Whether we had kids or not, we don’t have to celebrate anything you don’t want to,” Damien said solemnly.

  They sat quietly for a few moments, lost in their own thoughts, before Ella said, almost hesitantly, “I blame my mom.”

  “For what?”

  “Their deaths. I think she could have left it at telling my dad she wanted a divorce. She didn’t have to get into all the stuff about not loving him. She was more honest than she needed to be. They’d still be alive if she hadn’t told him that. Her admission broke him, and that’s what killed them.”

  Damien looked at her oddly.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You said something similar when you told me about Grace. You said you blamed her suicide on her dad. If he hadn’t confessed to an affair, her parents wouldn’t have divorced, and Grace wouldn’t have committed suicide.”

  “I do believe that.”

  “Huh.” He rubbed his jaw. “Do you feel the same about us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you think there are things we shouldn’t share with each other?”

  Ella’s chest tightened, but she smiled. “Are you hiding something from me, Damien?”

  He looked at the glass in his hand. “Nothing of import.”

  She nudged his shoulder. “Are you trying to tell me that you hate turkey, too?”

  He laughed. “No.”

  Ella grinned before sobering. She thought of the one thing she desired almost as much as she wanted Damien. A baby girl. She brought his hand to her lips and kissed the inside of his wrist, letting her mouth linger on his skin. Then she met his eyes. “If it’s something that could hurt our marriage, then no, maybe we shouldn’t share it. I’d hate for us to not work out. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Damien.”

  “Me too.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Ella wakes at noon craving coffee and pancakes drenched in maple syrup. The sun is out, a perfect spring day. The blue bay will be speckled with white sails should she get up and look out the window. But she’s tight and deliciously sore from her and Damien’s predawn aerobics, and rolling over and burrowing under the covers sounds like a perfect way to spend the day. She stretches. A lingering arousal clings to her. Damien’s scent clings to her.

  Ella extends an arm across the bed. Damien’s side is empty. Knowing him, he’s been up for hours. Probably already went for a run.

  She sits up in bed and startles when she sees Damien in the corner armchair, fully dressed in faded jeans and a blue Henley. Hair damp from a recent shower. He watches her with a stony expression. She pulls the sheets around herself, feeling self-conscious under the weight of his stare.

  “How long have you been up?” she asks.

  “A few hours.”

  “How long have you been sitting there?”

  “Same.”

  Ella moistens her lips and slowly nods. She’s not sure what to say, where to begin. But Damien does.

  “I saw the photo.” The one on the internet.

  Ella’s heart sinks, heavy with guilt.

  “Do you have any idea how that made me feel? Seeing the two of you together like that? Why would you do that to us?”

  “It’s not what you—”

  “You’re looking at him the same way you look at me,” he interjects, voice raised. “What does he mean to you?”

  Nothing! she wants to shout. But she doesn’t really know that.

  She shakes her head.

  “Do you love him?” he asks, his voice flat.

  Her head snaps up. “No!”

  “Did you sleep with him?”

  Ella opens her mouth to object. But the denial falls flat on her tongue. She looks down at her lap. “I thought it would trigger my memories.” Half truth. The last thing she wants Damien to hear is how she couldn’t resist consoling Nathan. She couldn’t resist him.

  Damien taps the chair with his index finger. Ella glances back up at him and he sighs heavily. “That’s on me. I should have told you about him. I shouldn’t have—” He plucks at a loose thread on the chair’s arm.

  “You shouldn’t have what?”

  He smooths the suede fabric where he plucked off the thread. “I shouldn’t have listened to you.”

  “Me? About what?”

 
; “At the hospital. I promised that no matter how often you asked or how difficult it would be not to say anything, that I wouldn’t tell you what happened. You made me promise to lie to you if I had to. Throw you off course when I needed to, because you knew you would ask questions. I agreed to do whatever it took so that you and I could start over. Pretend that the seven months before the accident never happened.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your memory loss. It’s intentional. You did it to yourself.”

  Ella’s mouth falls open for a beat. She then laughs, tossing her head back. “You aren’t serious?” she says when she can get the words out.

  “I’m dead serious.” He doesn’t smile.

  Ella stops laughing. “Impossible.” She did her research on selective memory loss after Dr. Allington’s diagnosis. Motivated forgetting, the purposeful repression of memories on a conscious level, is highly questionable. It’s a theory. Unproven, from what Ella read. There is still much scientists and psychologists don’t understand when it comes to memories.

  Ella slides off the bed and walks to their closet.

  “What’re you doing?” Damien asks.

  “Getting dressed.” She isn’t going to sit and listen to this nonsense. The nerve of him to blame her. He’s the one who’s avoided talking about the accident and Simon. If Damien can’t own the reasons for his silence, she doesn’t want any part of this conversation.

  She yanks on panties and yoga pants, straps on a sports bra, and tugs on a tank top. Marlene should have an afternoon hot yoga class on today’s schedule at her studio. Ella needs to get out of the house and sweat out her angst.

  After brushing her teeth and twisting her hair into a messy bun, she returns. Damien hasn’t moved.

  “I’m going to make coffee. When I get back, I expect the truth from you, not this crap about intentional memory loss.”

  His jaw ticks. “I am telling the truth.”

  “Do you hear yourself? Do you seriously expect me to believe I chose to forget our baby?”

  “You weren’t supposed to forget Simon.”

  She goes cold. He said the same thing to her in the hospital. Ella remembers that. She remembers his anger. He didn’t believe her then. He thought she was pretending.

  “Last summer, you interviewed an actress named Amira Silvers. For whatever reason, the article didn’t go to print. But she wanted to forget something that happened when she was a kid and had found a doctor who was helping her suppress the memories. Dr. Irwin Whitely is a cognitive scientist doing cutting-edge research in the areas of memory control and motivated forgetting. You approached him to get his story. You wanted to write a feature on his groundbreaking research. You interviewed him last August in Reno.”

  Reno. She ran into Nathan in Reno. But that was in October.

  “Show me this doctor,” she demands.

  Damien stands and retrieves his phone from his back pocket. He brings up the website to Dr. Whitely’s lab and gives Ella his phone.

  Ella skims through the site’s pages, speed-reading sections of Dr. Whitely’s research. The lab is a neuroscience research center focused on studying the mechanisms that underlie memory control. Most people, especially as they age, want to improve their ability to retain and retrieve memories. But this facility, with the use of advanced techniques and a diagnostic approach, doesn’t just center on improving the ability to retrieve memories. It aims to control the retrieval process, training individuals to consciously and deliberately do the opposite of retrieving memories. It rewires the brain to block specific memories, on purpose, at the individual’s will. The lab claims that once the mind has been conditioned to intervene in the memory retrieval process, which takes multiple sessions, all an individual would need to do to consciously repress a person or event from memory is to apply a string of unique code, a formula of words, that has been programmed into the brain. The same process works to reverse the effects.

  “Did this guy do something to me?” Ella asks, returning his phone.

  “Dr. Whitely? You agreed to be one of his test subjects. I don’t think you intentionally set out to forget anything specific, it was just research on your part. You wanted a better understanding of his methods. Twice a week for two and a half months, you drove to Reno. He taught you how to suppress specific memories about someone you know or something that happened to you. The theory behind it is that by virtually wiping someone from your mind, you wipe out everything associated with that person. You told me he intends to use his research as therapy for people who were abused as kids. They could forget what happened to them. After we lost Simon, you told me in the hospital that Dr. Whitely had given you the tools to forget everything that happened, and you wanted to forget Nathan specifically. For the sake of us, I agreed to help you.”

  She did forget Nathan and everything associated with him. Meeting him. Interviewing him. Sleeping with him. Her pregnancy.

  Simon is mine.

  Tears well in her eyes. She squeezes them shut. She forgot her pregnancy because she forgot everything associated with Nathan. Why hadn’t she thought that through? How stupid could she have been, and for Damien to go along with her?

  Wiping her eyes, she clears her throat and turns around. “Nathan said some things to me. He claims Simon was his.”

  Damien’s face falls.

  “Damien?” Her voice comes out as a thin whisper. “Is it true?”

  “I’m not Simon’s biological father.”

  Ella has the sudden urge to run to the bathroom and vomit.

  “Did I know?”

  He slowly shakes his head, his eyes dropping to the floor. “I don’t think so. If you knew, you didn’t tell me.”

  “You don’t think so? Then how did you know Simon wasn’t yours?”

  Damien sighs. He stares at the floor.

  “Damien?”

  His gaze meets hers. “I’m sterile.”

  Ella’s mouth falls open. She blinks. “You’re sterile?”

  He nods. “I found out in my early twenties. Anna had trouble conceiving so we both got checked out. She was fine. I wasn’t.”

  Ella’s heart goes out to Damien. Her big, strong, larger-than-life Damien. So ashamed and embarrassed that he’d kept the truth from her. He hadn’t been honest with her.

  She guessed it was easier for him to say he doesn’t ever want kids than to admit he could never have them.

  Which pisses her off even more. How dare he assume she would have walked away from him. Did he think so little of her? Unlike Anna, she never would have left him.

  “Did I know that you were sterile?”

  “Yes. I told you the day of the accident. Right before you got in the car.”

  We need to talk.

  The words she remembered in the hospital but couldn’t quite grasp.

  Ella stumbles back. Of course. He must have told her out of guilt, unable to live with his secret any longer. He’d known all along he wasn’t the father.

  Ella can picture it clearly. Damien would have accused her of cheating on him. And he would have been right. But still.

  “You let me believe you were the father. How could you?” Ella accuses, voice rising.

  “You wanted a baby,” Damien fires back. “You have no idea what it feels like to not be able to give you that. I will never, ever be able to create life with you.”

  “You were going to raise Simon as your own?”

  “Yes.”

  “And let me believe he was yours?”

  “Yes!”

  “For the rest of our lives?”

  “Yes, dammit!” He kicks the ottoman. It flips over. “And I could have done it,” he bellows, stabbing his chest with a finger. “Donovan and I are the same. Same coloring. Same height. We even look the same. No one would question that Simon wasn’t mine.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “No! Not crazy. In love. With you. I’m so fucking in love with you, El. I didn’t want to lose you over something
I couldn’t give you.”

  Ella sinks onto the edge of the bed, facing Damien. Her rage burns hot yet her heart breaks for him. The fact he kept his secret from her for so long tells how ashamed he is. He bit his tongue.

  Damien lifts his head. “I wanted to adopt. Anna did not. She married a coworker six months after our divorce finalized. Her first daughter was born five months later.”

  She wants to ask more about his marriage. She’s realizing there’s much about him she’s let slide by. Important aspects of his past they haven’t discussed. People and events that have shaped him into the individual he is now. Those are conversations they need to have, but they’ll have to wait.

  Right now, she needs to get to the heart of where they’d gone wrong.

  CHAPTER 29

  “I’m going to make coffee. Do you want one?” She needs time to let everything sink in. Damien could use the break, too. She can tell it wasn’t an easy admission for him.

  The same man who’s appeared on the covers of Entrepreneur and Business Insider, quoted in countless other articles and publications as an IT security and business strategist expert, sees himself as inadequate. He probably believes she’d love him less, even leave him like his first wife, had he told her. Damien follows Ella to the kitchen. She boils water and pours it over the coffee grounds. Damien adds a splash of whiskey to their mugs. They stand beside each other, hips leaning against the marble-capped center island. She takes her first sip, feels the sharp prickly warmth of the whiskey as it coats her tongue and washes down her throat.

  “Do you remember the first time we saw this kitchen?” Damien asks as he glides his hand on the countertop.

  She watches his fingers touch the cool stone and feels a blush spread across her chest and up her neck. She remembers the feel of the marble against the bare skin of her thighs, the pressure of his fingers digging into her hips.

  “Yes,” she says. She wants to take his hand in hers but senses he doesn’t want her touch. She cheated on him, twice. Guilt leaves a bitter taste in her mouth the coffee can’t wash down.

  “Do you remember what I said to you?”