Before He Remembered Me, I Learned to Forget Him

Three nights before the wedding feast, Lorenzo Barone was taken off the road on his way to collect my gown.

He came back alive. He came back with no memory of me, and every time a soul mentioned the union of our bloodlines, he'd go pale and drop where he stood.

The Family's tame clinic called it a second self, something the abduction had cracked open in him.

And as it happened, I'd just learned I was carrying. The doctor told me: maybe the child could wake the man who'd once loved me so much.