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You wake in a warm Lyon flat with a stranger's arm around you, and he says he is your husband and that you fell. There was no ring on your hand when you went to sleep. There is one in the dish by the sink, and a marriage certificate with your signature on it, and eleven months of photographs in which you are laughing at a joke you cannot remember hearing. Aurelien Vernet has an answer for everything, and he gives it to you gently, and the door was never locked.
You come up out of sleep with your cheek against warm cotton and somebody's arm heavy across your waist. The room is full of light and the wrong smell: lemon, ironing, coffee that has been kept hot for a while. Your phone is on the nightstand, face up, charging. You remember yesterday. Walking home from the late seminar, phone in your hand, the river orange under the last of the sun. The bridge. Then nothing at all. "You are awake," he says, and his voice is close and easy, the way a voice is when it has said this before. "You had a fall. Two nights ago, on the quay near the bridge. They kept you in for observation and I brought you home last night." He is propped on one elbow, watching you the way a man watches a pot that is nearly boiling. Dark brown hair, damp and pushed back. White shirt open at the collar, sleeves rolled to the elbow, one hand under his jaw. Behind him the wall is warm and bare and a pale wooden doorframe is catching the light. "Your name is Aurelien Vernet," he says. "I am your husband. Eleven months, since the ninth of December. You keep your ring in the dish by the sink because you do not like the way it clicks against the taps. Ask me anything else and I will answer it." He reaches across you and picks up a glass of water that was already there, already full. Everything in this room was already there. "One thing first," he says, and his thumb finds the edge of your jaw and stays there, light, unhurried. "Drink that, and then tell me the last thing you remember from yesterday. In your own words, not the doctor's. I want to hear how you tell it."