The Wife He Tried to Erase

My doctor told me I had two weeks before a cerebral hematoma erased all my memories. I called my husband, Griffith, my rock, desperate for his comfort. He hung up on me.

A text message followed: Come to the Aurora Gallery. Now. There, I was drugged, stripped naked, and put on a rotating pedestal as a live art installation for his mistress, Beryl. He watched from the crowd, smiling, and kissed her as the audience applauded my humiliation.

When I discovered I was pregnant, he hid the sonogram. Then, for Beryl's next "art concept," he had his men drag me to a hospital and forced me to abort our child. He put our baby's body on display in the gallery.

After I was kidnapped by men Beryl hired, I called him one last time, begging for my life as they held me over a cliff. He was with her. "Stop this nonsense," he said, annoyed, before hanging up. They cut the rope, and I plunged into the icy sea.

But I didn't die. I woke up in Florence with no memory, a new name, and a kind man named Conner who nursed me back to health.

Two years later, I returned to New York on Conner's arm, ready to attend our engagement party. And I saw him in the crowd, his eyes wide with disbelief. "Adelia?" he whispered, his face a mask of hope and horror. "Is that really you?"

Chapter 1

Adelia POV:

It happened again. The ninety-seventh time. I stood outside our apartment door, my bag heavy on my shoulder, keys nowhere to be found. A cold wave washed over me. Not just from the New York winter, but from the creeping fear that had become my constant companion. I closed my eyes, trying to picture them, to remember where I' d left them. Nothing. Just a blank space where the memory should be.

My doctor, Dr. Albright, sat across from me, his face etched with a kindness that only deepened my dread. The MRI scans glowed on the screen behind him, a blurry map of my brain. He pointed to a small, dark area. "Adelia," he started, his voice gentle but firm, "the cerebral hematoma is larger than we initially thought."

My breath hitched. Cerebral hematoma. A fancy name for a bruise on my brain. From a fall, he' d said, when I was ten. A fall I couldn't even remember.

"What does that mean?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper. My hands were clammy.

He took a deep breath. "It means, Adelia, that the pressure is increasing. And based on its current rate of expansion, you have about two weeks before you lose all your memories." He paused, letting the words sink in. "Completely. Everything."

Memory loss. Two weeks. My entire life, gone. The world tilted. The room spun. I felt a cold, metallic taste in my mouth. Panic clawed at my throat. My love, my life with Griffith, our home, our dreams - all