Richard became that certainty.
After I was discharged, I had nowhere that truly felt like home. My parents had been gone for years, and I couldn’t remember much about the apartment where I had supposedly lived before the crash.
Richard offered me the spare room in his place.
“It’s temporary,” he said. “Just until you get back on your feet.”
Temporary turned into months.
Months turned into dinners together.
Late-night conversations.
Quiet walks after physical therapy.
Then one evening, while sitting on his couch with my injured leg stretched across his lap, I realized I had fallen in love with him.
Eighteen months later, he proposed.
And now, two years after the accident, I was standing at our wedding reception wearing his ring.
I should have felt completely happy.
Instead, something had been bothering me all day.
That morning, while Richard adjusted the cuffs of his shirt, I had finally asked him something that seemed obvious in retrospect.
“Where are all your old friends?”
He hesitated for just a moment.
“People drift apart.”
“None of them are coming?”
“A few know about what happened to you. I didn’t want our wedding turning into strangers asking whether you remember them.”
At the time, his answer sounded considerate.
Now, watching him from across the terrace, I wondered why it suddenly sounded different.
Richard stood near the railing with a champagne glass in one hand.
His shoulders were tense.
His fingers trembled.
When he noticed me watching, he turned away.
That was when I followed him outside.
I had no idea that within hours, everything I believed about our love story would begin to collapse.
Part 2 — The Confession He Never Finished
The night air was colder than I expected.
Richard stood with both hands against the terrace railing, staring into the dark garden below.
“Richard?”
He didn’t answer immediately.
Then he lifted his champagne glass, missed his mouth slightly, and wine spilled across his fingers.
I stepped closer.
“You’ve had enough.”
He gave a strange laugh.
It wasn’t happy.
It wasn’t even drunk.
It sounded frightened.
“What is it?”
He finally turned.
The expression on his face made my stomach tighten.
I had never seen him look at me that way.
It was as though he had been carrying something heavy for years and had suddenly decided he couldn’t hold it anymore.
“If you knew the truth about me,” he said quietly, “you wouldn’t be wearing that ring.”
