Fate Forgotten by Amalia Dillin Page A

husband?”
    “A very long time ago.” She frowned and wondered if she could put a date to it. “It was maybe nine or ten lives before Christ. Before even Rome was founded.”
    He pulled away from her and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. “ Bien sûr. ”
    “What do you mean, of course?” She hadn’t meant to upset him. It was always a mistake to talk about her pasts. Always. Why did she insist on repeating that blunder time and again? “Garrit? You’re not mad at me are you? I assumed René must have known, and that was why the family trusted him.”
    “ Non .” He stopped and rubbed his face. Just sitting there. “ Non ,” he said again more gently. “I am not mad at you, Abby. I just wish things were a little bit less complicated.”
    She sighed. “I’m sorry.”
    He shook his head and lay back in the bed again. Whatever decision he had made about getting up abandoned. “This isn’t in any way your fault. You have nothing at all to apologize for. Nothing at all.”
    She curled up against his side, resting her head against his chest and listening to his heartbeat. His skin was even warmer now. As if his frustration and anger had been turned directly into body heat. “It was easier when I was just Abby, for you. If I could forget, and just be Abby, without all the memory of Eve, it would be easier for you.”
    “ Peut-être. ” He held her against him and kissed the top of her head. “But even when you were just Abby, you were still Eve. You would not be the same person without all those memories.”
    “No. Probably not.” One day, she would ask Adam what it was like, living life after life without remembering. If it was easier or better. “I think I would miss knowing my family.”
    “We would have missed knowing you.”
    She frowned. “You wouldn’t have known what you were missing.”
    He stroked her hair. “What was his name?”
    “Who?”
    “The man you showed me.”
    She hesitated, only because she didn’t want to encourage him. Or let him realize that she remembered that life as though it had happened yesterday. Bad enough he already had to live in Ryam’s shadow. “Thorgrim.”
    He laughed, but she didn’t know why. “Fitting.”
    “I guess.” She didn’t want to admit she remembered her own name, too.
    “He’s the man your brother was shouting about?”
    She propped herself up and frowned at him. He was staring at the ceiling, but he looked at her when she moved. “You’re very curious.”
    “And you are not your usual forthcoming self.”
    “Some things are better left in the past.”
    He caressed her cheek. “Then let me help you to forget.”
    She was glad that Alex was sleeping in the nursery, and they had the room to themselves.

    Mia went into labor the following day, and they went as a family to the hospital to wait. Alex didn’t care for the waiting room, with the biting scent of antiseptic and sterile walls, and fussed until Eve settled him in her lap and read to him. It was probably half her own fault. If she hadn’t been uncomfortable in hospitals already, after her last life in the mental institute, Michael’s visit after Alex’s birth had ensured she’d never feel safe in one again. Especially not with Adam so near.
    He sat across the room, since Mia had kicked him out of the delivery room in favor of her mother, and together with her father and Garrit, the three men sat staring at the ceiling and the floor, anywhere but at each other, in silence.
    Mostly silence anyway.
    I’m sorry about yesterday , Adam said.
    She tripped over the sentence she was reading, though she probably shouldn’t have been surprised that he would try to talk to her now. Alex didn’t notice, and neither did Garrit. I’m not sure I want an explanation.
    Oh, I’m sure you’d love it. But I couldn’t explain if I wanted to. Not now.
    I don’t think now is appropriate anyway. Mia is in the process of giving birth to your child, Adam. She continued reading aloud,