I Buried My Husband… Then He Came Home

Chapter Two

Damian Voss did not remember most of his life before he was twenty- nine, and he had built an entire personality around not thinking about that fact.

It helped that he was extremely good at his job, and his job left very little room for reflection. Voss Capital had grown from a modest infrastructure fund into a firm that moved billions through real estate, energy, and municipal contracts across four continents, and all of that growth had happened in under two years, a pace that made competitors nervous and journalists suspicious and Damian himself, if he was honest in the rare moments he allowed himself honesty, a little dizzy. Tonight he stood in the mirror of his penthouse dressing room adjusting a tie that his chief of staff had already told him twice was crooked, and he studied his own reflection with the mild detachment of a man looking at a photograph of someone he’d once met.

“You’re doing the thing again,” said Simone Achebe from the doorway, arms crossed, dressed for the gala in dark green that made her look, as always, like she’d stepped out of an entirely different and more competent century.

“What thing.”

“The staring at yourself like you’re trying to solve a math problem thing.”

Damian huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Maybe I am.”

“You have a headache.”

It wasn’t a question. Simone had a way of stating facts about him that were somehow always accurate, which he found either comforting or deeply unsettling depending on the day. Tonight he couldn’t decide which.

“A small one,” he admitted.

“Dr. Rourke wants you to call if it gets worse than a four.”

“It’s a two.”

“It’s never a two when you say it’s a two.”

He didn’t argue, mostly because she was right, and mostly because the headache wasn’t the part that bothered him. The headache was ordinary, manageable, the kind of thing that came with running on four hours of sleep and back to back calls with three different time zones. What bothered him was the flash he’d had twenty minutes ago while knotting his tie, so brief it barely qualified as a memory: a kitchen, small, sunlit, a woman’s hand reaching past him for a coffee mug, laughing at something he couldn’t hear.

He didn’t know the kitchen. He didn’t know the woman. He had was, for one disorienting second, an ache in his chest so specific and so foreign that he’d had to grip the edge of the sink to steady himself.

This had been happening for months. Rourke called them “processing artifacts,” said his brain was simply integrating information faster than it could sort it, some neurological quirk left over from the accident that had put him in a coma for six weeks before he woke up in a private clinic outside Geneva with no memory of anything before that, a fractured skull, and a name that a very calm, very well-dressed man named Viktor Kessler had told him was his own.

Damian had never questioned it. Why would he. Kessler had papers, medical records, an entire life laid out for him in neat folders: a childhood in Zurich, an estranged family he had no interest in reconnecting with, an education at a business school he had no memory of attending but whose campus, when he’d once visited out of curiosity, had felt eerily and uncomfortably familiar in a way he couldn’t explain and chose not to examine. He built Voss Capital because Kessler backed him and because, it turned out, he had an uncanny instinct for reading financial systems, spotting the places where money moved wrong, understanding risk in a way that was less like learned skill and more like muscle memory from a life he couldn’t access.

Most days he didn’t think about any of it. Most days he was simply Damian Voss, and that was enough.

Tonight was not most days.

“You need to eat something before we go,” Simone said, checking her watch. “You get strange when you’re low on food and running on flashes.”

“I’m fine.”

“You said that after the last one too, right before you walked into a glass door at the Zurich office.”

“That door was poorly marked.”

“Damian.”

He turned from the mirror and looked at her properly, the way he rarely did, because Simone had a habit of watching him like she expected something to go wrong, some fracture to appear, and it made him tired in a way he couldn’t name. “I’m fine,” he said again, more gently. “It was just a headache. I’ll eat at the gala.”

She studied him a moment longer, the way she always did, some calculation running behind her eyes that he’d never been able to fully read, and then she nodded and gestured toward the door.

The gala was being held at the old Ashworth Hotel downtown, a building with the kind of ornate, gilded lobby that made Damian’s back teeth ache, though he couldn’t have said why. He shook hands, smiled at the right moments, made small talk with three separate city council members and a woman who ran the largest children’s hospital in the state and wanted his money for a new pediatric wing. He was good at this. He’d always been good at this, or so he assumed, having no other version of himself to compare it to.

It was nearly an hour into the event, somewhere between the second round of champagne and the start of the silent auction, when he registered it.

He couldn’t explain what it was, exactly. Not a memory, not this time. Just a pull, sudden and physical, like a compass needle swinging toward true north, and he turned his head before he understood why he was turning it at all.

Across the ballroom, half hidden behind a marble pillar, a woman was staring at him.

She was pretty in an unassuming way, dark hair pulled back loosely, wearing a black dress that looked borrowed, like she hadn’t planned to be here and had raided someone else’s closet at the last minute. But it wasn’t her looks that stopped him cold. It was the way she was looking at him, like she’d seen a ghost, one hand pressed flat against her own chest as if she were physically holding herself together.

Their eyes met for perhaps two seconds. In that span, something in Damian’s chest lurched so violently that he actually took a half step backward, nearly colliding with a waiter carrying a tray of champagne flutes.

“Sir?” the waiter said.

“I’m fine,” Damian said automatically, though he was very much not sure that was true.

When he looked back toward the pillar, the woman was gone.

He scanned the crowd, feeling something close to panic rising in him, an emotion so disproportionate to the situation that he was almost embarrassed by it even as it happened. He didn’t know this woman. He had never seen her before in his life, he was almost entirely certain of that. And yet his body had reacted to the sight of her the way you’d react to nearly stepping off a curb into oncoming traffic, that jolt of primal alarm that bypassed thought entirely.

“Everything okay?” Simone appeared at his elbow, following his gaze.

“Did you see her? Dark hair, black dress, by the pillar over there?”

Simone looked, frowned slightly. “I don’t see anyone.”

“She was just there.”

“Damian.” Simone’s voice had shifted into the careful register she used when she thought he was about to have an episode in public, and he hated that tone more than almost anything else in his life, the way it made him feel like a piece of expensive equipment that might malfunction without warning. “Do you need to sit down?”

“No. No, I’m fine, I just.” He stopped. He didn’t have a way to finish that sentence that didn’t sound insane. I just felt something I’ve never was before about a woman I’ve never met, and it terrified me.

“I’m going to get you some water,” Simone said, already moving. “Stay here.”

He didn’t stay there. He couldn’t, not with his heart still hammering and that strange gravitational pull still tugging somewhere behind his sternum, and so he moved through the crowd toward the pillar, toward where she’d been standing, some instinct driving him forward that he couldn’t have named or explained even to himself.

She was gone. Of course she was gone. He stood there for a long moment, feeling foolish, feeling something else too, something closer to grief than he had words for, an emotion that had no right to exist in him for a stranger he’d seen for two seconds across a crowded room.

That night, lying awake in his penthouse long after the gala had ended, he had the dream again. Fire. The smell of scorched metal. A woman’s voice, screaming a name that wasn’t his own, over and over, until the sound of it seemed to tear something loose inside his chest.

He woke at four in the morning, drenched in sweat, his hand pressed instinctively over his heart, and he could not, for the life of him, remember what the name had been.

He lay in the dark of his penthouse bedroom for a long time afterward, listening to the city hum thirty floors below, and tried to do what Dr. Rourke had taught him to do whenever an episode left him rattled: name five things he could see, four things he could touch, ground himself back in the version of his life that had solid edges and verifiable facts. Five things he could see. The outline of the window against the city glow. The shape of his own hand on the sheets. The red standby light on the television across the room. The pale rectangle of his phone on the nightstand. The ceiling, blank and unremarkable, the one part of this apartment that had never once triggered anything in him at all.

It didn’t help the way it usually did.

He got up eventually, poured himself a glass of water he didn’t drink, and stood at the window looking down at the lights of a city he’d lived in for less than two years, a city that was, most days, like the only home he’d ever known simply because it was the only one he could remember. He thought about the woman by the pillar. He thought about the sensation that had gone through him at the sight of her, sharp and immediate, nothing like the vague déjà vu he sometimes got from certain streets or certain songs on the radio. This had been specific. Located. Like a key turning in a lock he hadn’t known was there.

He thought, too, about Simone’s face when he’d asked if she’d seen the woman, the careful blankness that had settled over her features a half second too quickly, the kind of blankness people wore when they were choosing their words rather than simply speaking them.

He didn’t know why that detail bothered him so much. Simone was always careful. It was, in fact, most of what he paid her for, that particular gift for controlling a room, controlling information, controlling him when he needed controlling, which according to Dr. Rourke was more often than he liked to admit. He told himself there was nothing strange about her being careful now.

He didn’t fully believe himself, and that, more than the dream, more than the woman, more than any of it, was what kept him awake until the sky outside his window went from black to the flat gray of early morning, at which point he finally gave up on sleep entirely and went down to his private gym to run until his legs ached too much to think about anything at all.