After a few days of skipping college, I still couldn't bring myself to go. I didn't know why, but something just didn't feel right. However, today I decided to go—not to attend classes but to sit at the spot where I had kissed her on the footpath. I sat there, lost in thought, when a group of her college colleagues approached me.
One of them started questioning me, asking who I was and why I had defended her that day during the fight. What could I say to them? Should I tell them, "She's my fiancée"? Or maybe, "She was my fiancée"? The truth was, she didn't even seem to recognize me anymore.
I stayed silent, hoping they'd lose interest, but one of them suddenly punched me in the face. Before I could react, the others joined in, beating me mercilessly. When they finally left, I sat there for five minutes, dazed and in pain, wondering if this was all just a bad dream.
And then, as if she had stepped out of my thoughts, she appeared. She walked toward me, her eyes filled with tears, as though she was the one feeling the pain of my injuries. Just like before—whenever I got hurt, she was the one who seemed to feel it more deeply.
I didn't know what to say. The first words that came out of my mouth were, "You're back."
To my surprise, we both ended up saying the same thing at the same time: that we wanted to go to her house. She wanted to take me there, and I wanted to see it for myself.
As we walked, nearing her house, I felt a strange sense of unfamiliarity. I had never been to this place before. Why had she never taken me here? Was she hiding herself all this time? Or was there something even deeper she was keeping from me?
She noticed the confusion on my face but said nothing. When we reached her house, she brought out a first-aid kit and began to tend to my bruises. Her hands were gentle, just like before, but her eyes seemed distant.
Then she said something that shook me to my core. She revealed that she had been in an accident. I hadn't known anything about it—on our wedding day, no less. That day, after we argued, she had taken her car keys and gone on a long drive. That's what Avi had told me.
But now I wasn't sure what to believe. Was Avi lying to me? Or was she?
She told me something even stranger: that she felt like she had two souls. How could that even be possible? I didn't know how to process her words or whether I could believe them. She had been gone for over eleven months, and now she was suddenly back.
Her expressions were confusing, almost as if she didn't recognize me at all. When I said my name and her own name, something flickered in her eyes—like she knew those names but not the story behind them.
Before she could say anything else, I asked, "Don't you remember the day we met?"
Her silence was deafening.
Then I learned something that broke me further. My fiancée had been in an accident on our wedding day, and I hadn't even known. The person I had trusted, Avi, had kept this from me. Rage boiled inside me as I realized I needed answers. The fucking Avi.
"Do you know who Avi is?" I asked her. She looked at me and handed me her phone, showing me a message from an unknown number. I checked the number—it was Avi's.
I wanted to trust her, to believe that she was telling me the truth. So I asked her, "Can I move in with you? Stay here, in your house?Maybe then I can understand everything and believe you fully."