After My Boss Forgot Our Three-Year Relationship

The fluorescent lights of the neurology wing hummed with a low, synthetic vibration that settled directly into my teeth. I kept my hands folded neatly over my purse, hiding the crescent-moon indentations my fingernails were carving into my palms.

"Retrograde amnesia," Dr. Aris was saying, his voice a practiced, clinical murmur. "The trauma to the temporal lobe was significant. Based on our preliminary cognitive assessments, Mr. Grant is missing roughly thirty-six months of memory."

Thirty-six months.

Three years.

The exact duration of my invisible imprisonment.

I didn't gasp. I didn't cry. The air in my lungs turned to ice-cold crystal. Three years meant Leighton didn't remember our first meeting. He didn't remember the slow, suffocating tightening of his affection, the way his love felt like a velvet garrote. And most importantly, he didn't remember the ironclad relationship-employment contract locked in a vault downstairs—a document rigged with a penalty clause so staggering it would bankrupt me three times over if I ever tried to walk away.

If he didn't remember I was his girlfriend, I didn't have to break up with him. I didn't have to trigger the clause.

*I just have to be the assistant.*

"Can I see him?" I asked, my voice impossibly steady.

I pushed open the door to Room 412. The air inside was heavy, smelling of iodine and the sterile chill of filtered oxygen. Leighton was sitting up in the hospital bed. A white bandage wrapped around his temple, stark against his dark hair, and shadows bruised the skin beneath his eyes.

He should have looked diminished. He didn't. Even battered and tethered to a heart monitor, Leighton Grant took up all the oxygen in the room.

I stopped exactly four feet from the edge of his bed. The professional boundary line.

He turned his head. His eyes—a deep, slate gray that usually tracked my every movement with suffocating precision—locked onto me. The heart monitor beside him gave a sudden, rapid stutter before settling into a faster rhythm.

"And who are you?" His voice was gravelly, scraped raw from the intubation tube, but the quiet, absolute authority remained untouched.

I smoothed the front of my pencil skirt, burying the tremor in my fingers. "I'm Ariella Morgan, Mr. Grant. I'm your executive assistant. I manage your schedule."

Leighton didn't blink. He didn't look at my face; he looked *into* it, searching for a seam, a fracture. His gaze dropped to my throat, where my pulse was undoubtedly hammering against my collarbone, then dragged slowly down the line of my body before snapping back to my eyes.

"My assistant," he repeated. The words tasted foreign in his mouth.

"Yes. I wanted to brief you on the transition plan for your recovery."

He tilted his head, the muscles in his jaw ticking. He didn't remember me. The doctor had confirmed it. Yet, the way he watched me wasn't the way a man looks at an employee. It was the way a predator recognizes a scent it can't quite place.