The first thing Callum said when he woke was, "Get her away from me."

He looked through me as if our seven years together had been erased.

For a moment, I forgot how to breathe.

The private hospital room smelled of antiseptic, wilted lilies, and the chicken broth cooling in the thermos beside me. I had made a fresh batch every morning since the crash because Callum always wanted it when he was sick. I had also washed his hair with a plastic basin, changed his sweat-soaked shirts, rubbed circulation back into his fingers, and slept with my cheek against the rail of his bed.

None of that existed in his eyes.

"Callum?" I whispered.

His fingers tightened around Iris's. She had arrived less than an hour earlier in a cream dress and perfect makeup, carrying flowers she handed to a nurse before taking the chair I had barely left all week.

"Who is she?" Callum asked.

The question split something inside me.

His mother, Eleanor, pressed both hands to her mouth. Richard Lancaster turned sharply toward the neurologist. "Doctor, what does this mean?"

Dr. Hale stepped to the foot of the bed, keeping his voice calm. "Memory disruption after a traumatic brain injury can be temporary. We need to avoid overwhelming him. Familiar faces may return in fragments. Pressure can make the confusion worse."

"I'm familiar," I said. My engagement ring felt suddenly too heavy. "I'm his fiancée."

Callum's expression hardened. "No."

I tried to smile even as tears burned behind my eyes. "We've been together seven years. Our wedding is in October. You chose the vineyard yourself because you said—"

"Stop." He winced and touched the bandage at his temple. "I don't know you. Don't stand there telling me what I chose."

I took one step closer. "It's me, Cal. Audrey."

"I said get her away from me."

Iris rose at once and leaned over him. "You're safe. Don't strain yourself."

His shoulders loosened at the sound of her voice. He let her smooth the hair from his forehead, then accepted water from the cup she held to his lips. The intimacy of it was quiet, effortless, and far more painful than shouting would have been.

Eleanor touched my elbow. "Audrey, darling, perhaps you should give him a little time."

"I've given him every minute since the paramedics brought him in."

Her face crumpled with guilt. "I know. We all know."

Richard cleared his throat. "Callum, Audrey has handled everything while you were unconscious. The doctors, the insurance company, the board—"

"Then thank her and let her go home," Callum said.

Iris lowered her eyes, but I saw the tiny curve at the corner of her mouth before she hid it.

I left because Dr. Hale asked me to. In the bathroom, I locked myself in a stall and cried into my hands until my ribs hurt. Then I washed my face, wrapped gauze around the raw skin where my ring had dug into my palm, and returned before visiting hours ended.

For the next two days, I obeyed every medical instruction. I did not mention the wedding. I did not show Callum our photographs. I stayed near the window and answered only when he asked a question.

He never asked me one.

He asked Iris what music he liked. He asked Iris which side he slept on. He asked Iris whether he hated peas and whether the scar on his knee came from soccer. She answered with stories from their childhood, laughing softly while he watched her as if she were guiding him home.

I knew those stories too. I knew what he drank after nightmares, how he loosened his cuff links when he lied, and why thunderstorms made him check every lock in the house. But each time I opened my mouth, his face closed.

On the third morning, I arrived with broth simmering in a steel flask. Callum was sitting upright, color finally returning to his face. Iris perched on the edge of his mattress in one of his shirts.

My steps faltered. "Why are you wearing that?"

"She spilled coffee," Callum said. "Don't start."

"I wasn't starting anything." I set the tray down with careful hands. "You haven't eaten. I made this the way you like it."

He stared at the bowl I poured for him. "I don't want it."

"Try a little. The nurse said you need protein before your medication."

"I said no."

"Callum, please. You always—"

His hand struck the tray.

The bowl spun off the table. Broth splashed across my wrist and hand, hot enough to make me cry out. Ceramic shattered on the floor. A red stain rose instantly over my skin.

Eleanor jumped from the sofa. "Audrey!"

I clutched my wrist against my chest. Callum did not apologize. He looked at me with open disgust.

"Stop using that word," he said.

"What word?"

"Always. You keep telling me what I always do, what I always feel, who I always loved. I don't belong to you because our parents signed contracts."

"Our relationship was not a contract."

"Then why is everyone trying to force it down my throat?" His voice rose. "Don't use the fiancée title to pressure me. Looking at you makes me sick."

The room went silent except for broth dripping from the table.

I wanted to tell him about the nights we had drawn plans for our first house across paper napkins. I wanted to remind him that he had proposed without either family present, kneeling in wet grass because he could not wait until dinner. Instead, I crouched to pick up the broken bowl with my uninjured hand.

A nurse hurried in and stopped me. "Leave that. Your hand needs treatment."

Iris moved closer to Callum. "You shouldn't upset him, Audrey. He needs peace."

I looked at her. "And you think sleeping here in his clothes gives him that?"

Her lower lip trembled on command. "I only stayed because he panicked when I tried to leave."

"She stays," Callum said. "You go."

I walked out with my burn wrapped in white gauze and my dignity held together by habit.

At the hospital entrance, rain hissed against the pavement. My driver opened the car door, but I could not make myself get in. What if Callum woke confused in the night? What if his headache worsened? What if Iris did not know he was allergic to codeine or that he sometimes stopped breathing when sedatives were too strong?

Love dragged me back through the revolving doors.

The lights on the private floor had been dimmed. I carried a list of his medications in my unburned hand and followed the corridor toward his room. Before I reached it, I heard Iris laugh.

The door stood partly open.

"We shouldn't," she whispered, though nothing in her voice asked him to stop.

"I want you," Callum answered.

I pushed the door wider.

Iris sat sideways in his lap, her blouse unbuttoned at the throat, both arms wound around his neck. Callum's hand rested beneath the hem of her skirt. His mouth was on hers.

For one suspended second, nobody moved.

Then Iris slowly lifted her face. Callum turned toward the doorway, his arm still locked around her waist.

Their eyes met mine.

"What is she doing here, Callum?"

My voice shook as I stepped toward them. My fingers curled into fists so tight my nails bit into my skin.

Iris flinched, shrinking behind him like a wounded bird. Her eyes welled with tears that spilled down her cheeks on cue.

"Audrey, please don't be mad at him," Iris whispered, clutching Callum's sleeve. "I never meant to get in the way of your engagement. I swear I didn't. I'll just go. I don't want to ruin your happiness."

"Stop lying," I snapped, stepping closer. "You knew exactly what you were doing. You knew he had a fiancée before he woke up without his memory!"

"That's enough!" Callum barked.

He didn't hesitate. He thrust his arm out and grabbed my shoulder, yanking me violently away from Iris.

I lost my footing on the slick tile.

The edge of the hard oak side table rushed up to meet me.

A sharp crack echoed in the room as the corner slammed into my forehead. Pain exploded behind my eyes, blinding and white-hot.

Warm liquid trickled down my temple, running past my eyebrow and dripping over my cheek.

"Callum..."

I reached up blindly from the floor, my fingers grazing the hem of his jacket. I needed him to pull me up. I needed him to see what he had just done.

Callum slapped my hand away.

"Don't touch me," he snarled.

He didn't look down at me. Not once. His back stayed firmly turned to my bleeding face as he wrapped both arms around Iris, pulling her trembling frame tight against his chest.

"You're okay, Iris," he murmured, his voice softening into a tone he hadn't used on me since the crash. "I'm right here. She won't lay a finger on you."

"Callum, let me go," Iris sobbed into his collar, her voice muffled against his skin. "I can't do this. I'm not a home-wrecker. I won't let people call me the other woman. We have to stop this."

"You are not the other woman," Callum declared. His voice cut across the room, loud enough for every doctor and nurse outside the cracked door to hear. "And you aren't leaving."

He turned slightly, his jaw rigid, casting a look of pure disgust in my direction.

"The engagement is over," he said coldly. "Hear it loud and clear, Audrey. It's done. I'm not spending the rest of my life tied to a total stranger."

The silence in the room was deafening.

I pressed my trembling palm to my forehead, soaking my fingers in crimson. "A stranger? Callum, we spent seven years together—"

"I don't remember seven seconds of it," he cut me off. "Get out."

***

I sat on the white leather couch in my parents' living room, a sterile gauze pad taped over my brow.

My father slammed his glass onto the marble coffee table, shattering the base.

"He laid hands on you?" My father stood up, his face flushed with fury. "The Lancaster boy dared to draw your blood? I'm pulling every dime of our capital from their development firm tonight. We'll crush them in court."

"Arthur, calm down," my mother pleaded, though her eyes blazed with equal rage as she knelt beside me. "Look at our girl. Audrey, darling, why didn't you let the hospital call the police?"

"No," I whispered, clutching my mother's wrist. "Dad, don't cancel the contracts. Please."

My father stared at me in disbelief. "Are you out of your mind? He threw you into a table for another woman!"

"He has amnesia, Dad!" I cried, the tears finally burning through my pride. "The doctors told us his personality could fluctuate. He doesn't know who he is right now. If you destroy his family's business, he'll hate me forever. I still love him."

"Audrey, have some self-respect," my father said sharply.

"I can't just turn it off!" I shouted back. "Seven years don't vanish just because his head hit a steering wheel! Please... just talk to his parents. Let Uncle Richard handle it. Don't ruin him."

My father let out a harsh, bitter breath. He grabbed his phone off the table.

"Fine. But Richard Lancaster is going to answer for this tonight."

Within an hour, the call was made.

Callum's parents were utterly horrified. His mother wept over the speakerphone, apologizing over and over, while Richard Lancaster roared with shame. They cursed Iris as an opportunistic parasite preying on a brain-damaged man. They promised my father that Callum would be forced to end whatever madness had started in that hospital, and that he would come to our doorstep on his knees to beg for my forgiveness.

I thought their intervention might wake Callum up.

I was wrong.

My phone screen lit up on my lap barely twenty minutes later. Callum's name flashed on the caller ID.

I answered instantly. "Callum?"

"Are you happy now?" His voice was venomous, vibrating through the receiver.

"What?"

"You ran straight home to cry to your parents like a pathetic, spoiled coward," he sneered. "My father just barged into my room threatening to cut me out of the family will if I don't crawl back to you."

"Callum, I didn't want them to threaten you—"

"Shut up!" he barked. "You make me sick, Audrey. You're despicable. You can't win my affection on your own, so you use your family's money and my parents to trap me? You're disgusting."

"I was bleeding, Callum! You shoved me into a table!"

"You threw yourself at me to play the victim!" he shouted. "Iris would never pull a stunt like this. Don't you dare call this number again."

The line went dead with a sharp click.

"Callum? Callum!"

I dropped the phone. The humiliation burned hotter than the gash on my forehead. He thought I staged it. He thought I was weaponizing our parents out of malice.

I couldn't let it sit like that. I couldn't let him rewrite the truth in his head.

I grabbed my coat, slipped past my parents' study, and drove through the dark streets back to the hospital.

The hospital corridor on the third floor was empty, the overhead lights dimmed for the night. I walked briskly toward room 302, rehearsing my words under my breath. I would tell him the truth calmly. I would make him look at me and listen.

I reached the doorway.

The heavy wooden door stood half an inch ajar.

A sharp, ragged gasp slipped through the crack.

"Callum... fuck, right there..."

My footsteps froze. My blood turned to ice water in my veins.

I nudged the door open just a millimeter wider.

The room was lit only by the pale glow of the streetlamps outside the window. Iris was sprawled across Callum's hospital bed, her white blouse ripped completely open, bunched uselessly beneath her armpits. Dark, purplish bruises and bite marks covered the pale skin of her neck and chest.

Callum hovered over her, his broad shoulders blocking half the mattress. He had both hands gripping her thighs, spreading her open as his mouth clamped down on her left breast.

He groaned into her flesh, sucking hard, his jaw working rhythmically. The wet, slick sounds of his tongue and lips pulling at her swollen nipple filled the quiet room.

"Callum... harder..." Iris whimpered, arching her back off the sheets.

Then, her eyes fluttered open.

Through the narrow crack in the door, Iris locked eyes with me.

She didn't startle. She didn't gasp, and she didn't try to pull her shirt over her bare, saliva-slicked chest.

Instead, a slow, venomous smirk spread across her lips. Keeping her gaze pinned directly on my face, Iris buried both hands into Callum's dark hair, thrusting her bare breast deeper into his ravenous mouth.

Callum pulled back for a fraction of a second, breathing heavily, his lips glistening wet in the dim light. He gripped her waist tightly, his fingers sinking into her bare skin.

"I'll break this engagement completely," he whispered against her bare skin, loud enough to cut through the quiet room. "Nobody is ever taking you away from me again."

"Audrey, move your feet."

Tessa's grip was an iron clamp around my bicep, dragging me down the corridor before my knees could give out.

"Tessa, wait—"

"I am not letting you stand outside that door and watch him screw her," Tessa hissed, shoving through the hospital's heavy exit doors into the biting ocean wind. "Get in the passenger seat. Now."

The car door slammed shut. Tessa gunned the engine, tearing down the coastal highway until the asphalt turned into crushed shells and packed sand.

She killed the ignition near the shoreline.

The roar of crashing waves filled the silence. The salt air whipped through the cracked window, cold and damp, but it couldn't wash away the chemical stench of hospital disinfectant clinging to my coat.

"Breathe," Tessa ordered, thrusting a thermos toward me. "Drink the coffee."

"He looked right at me," I whispered. My hands shook against the warm metal mug. "Iris saw me through the door, and she pushed him deeper into her."

"Because she's garbage, Audrey. And Callum is worse."

"He wasn't always like this," I protested, my voice cracking under the weight of seven years. "You remember how we met. My serpentine belt snapped on Route 9 in the pouring rain. He spent three hours in the mud replacing it, yelling at me for driving on a belt that was already frayed."

"And you thought that meant he was your protector," Tessa said flatly.

"He told me he was terrified of being abandoned," I said, staring at the gray froth of the surf. "When his family firm nearly collapsed three years ago, his partners jumped ship. Callum sat on the floor of his office, crying into his hands. He said everyone he ever loved walked away when things got hard."

"So you gave up your acceptance to Oxford."

"I stayed to help him rebuild," I admitted quietly. "I managed their PR. I smoothed over the board. When he got pneumonia, I slept on two plastic chairs in his office so he wouldn't miss his antibiotics. When his father had that bypass surgery, I drove the medical files across the state while Callum slept."

"And what did you get for it?" Tessa turned in her seat, pinning me with an unyielding glare. "A bloodied temple and a front-row seat to his affair."

"He has amnesia, Tessa! The doctors said the trauma—"

"Stop lying to yourself!" Tessa shouted, cutting me off with a sharp slap against the steering wheel. "A man with real amnesia doesn't single out his fiancée to torment! Callum didn't abandon you because he lost his memory, Audrey. He abandoned you the second his memory came back."

Her words felt like ice water dumped over my chest.

"What are you talking about?"

"Think about it," Tessa pressed, her voice dropping into an intense murmur. "If he truly didn't know who you were, he would be confused. He would be cautious. Instead, he treats you with calculated spite. He knows exactly where to push the knife to make you bleed."

My mouth opened, but no words came out. The chill in my bones grew heavier.

"Come on," Tessa sighed, glancing at my shivering shoulders. "Let's wait for dawn. The boardwalk café opens early."

By the time the first gray light touched the horizon, Tessa steered us toward the boardwalk café. It had just opened for the morning. We walked across the empty wooden planks in silence. The bell above the café door jingled, welcoming us into the warmth of steamed milk and roasted beans.

We took a high-backed leather booth tucked near the back corner.

Tessa stood up to order. "Black coffee for you, extra sugar. Don't move."

I leaned my head back against the leather, closing my eyes.

A high-pitched, melodic laugh drifted over the wooden partition behind me.

"Oh, stop it! He wasn't gentle at all," a familiar voice purred. "My neck is completely purple."

My eyes snapped open. Every muscle in my spine locked rigid.

It was Iris.

"Are you serious?" another woman asked, giggling across the adjacent booth. "In the hospital bed? Wasn't his head bandaged?"

"Callum doesn't care about a little concussion," Iris boasted. The clinking of a ceramic teaspoon against porcelain punctuated her smug tone. "He was all over me the minute his parents walked out."

"Wait, Iris, what about Audrey?" a third voice asked, lowered in hesitation. "Aren't their families merging corporate shares next month? Isn't she his fiancée?"

Iris let out a loud, mocking snort.

"Fiancée? Please. Callum never lost his memory. He woke up three days ago knowing exactly who he was."

The air vanished from my lungs.

"What?" the second friend gasped. "He remembered?"

"Of course he did," Iris said, her voice dripping with satisfaction. "He remembered Audrey the second he opened his eyes. The crash left him unconscious for a week, but his memory was intact when he woke. When he saw Audrey's suffocating face leaning over him, he realized he finally had the perfect out."

"Shut up! He faked the amnesia?"

"He concocted the whole thing," Iris laughed, clinking her glass against the table. "He told me he was sick of being indebted to her family. He said Audrey treated him like a charity case, hovering around him like some pathetic martyr. She spent a week crying beside him while he was unconscious, then kept bringing him homemade soup while he texted me beneath the hospital blankets."

"That is wicked, Iris."

"It's brilliant," Iris corrected smoothly. "If he broke the engagement while in his right mind, his father would have stripped his board seat and frozen his trust fund. But if he has 'traumatic personality shifts from brain damage'? His family can't blame him for rejecting a stranger. He told me she's just a huge nuisance. He said throwing her out felt better than winning a multimillion-dollar bid."

I sat frozen in the booth.

I didn't tremble. I didn't scream. I didn't tear around the wooden partition to claw the smirk off her face.

Instead, a quiet, eerie calm washed through my veins.

I slid my hand into my coat pocket. My fingers were completely steady as I unlocked my phone, opened the voice memo app, and hit the red circle.

The screen blinked, capturing the sound waves.

"So when is he announcing the split?" the friend asked.

"Tonight," Iris replied brightly. "He already sent her crying to her daddy. Once the Lancaster board agrees to buy out her family's shares, Callum and I are taking his yacht to Monaco. Audrey can spend the rest of her twenties finding another broken boy to fix."

I pressed the red button to stop the recording.

The file saved with a soft click.

Tessa returned to the table, carrying two mugs. She took one look at my face and paused, her eyebrows knitting together.

"Audrey? What happened?"

"Nothing," I said.

A slow, dry laugh escaped my throat. It sounded foreign, even to me.

"Audrey, you're scaring me," Tessa whispered, setting the mugs down.

"Drink your coffee," I said calmly, sliding out of the booth. "I have a phone call to make."

I walked past Iris's table without sparing her a single glance. She was applying pink lip gloss in a compact mirror, completely oblivious.

I stepped outside into the cold ocean wind.

I dialed my father's private line. It connected on the second ring.

"Audrey?" My father's voice was tight with tension. "Richard Lancaster just called me again, begging for more time. He claims Callum is mentally unstable from the trauma."

"Dad," I interrupted, my tone smooth, free of any tremble.

"What is it, sweetheart?"

"Pull every cent of our capital from their firm," I said.

A heavy pause hung on the line. "Audrey... are you sure? Earlier you begged me—"

"I was an idiot earlier," I cut in. "Call the attorneys. Dissolve the partnership. Terminate the joint accounts. Release a statement to the business wire before the market opens tomorrow morning. The engagement is dead."

My father let out a long breath. "Consider it done."

"Thank you, Dad."

I ended the call and lowered the phone.

A second later, the screen lit up with a banner notification.

*Callum:*

*Stop hiding behind your parents, Audrey. Call my father right now and tell him you're releasing me from the contract. If you don't issue a joint statement calling off the wedding by midnight, I'll leak to every news outlet that you're an abusive, unstable parasite trying to trap an injured man. End it.*

I stared at the harsh letters glowing against the dark glass.

Seven years burned down to ash in the span of ten seconds.

My thumbs moved over the keypad without hesitation.

*As you wish.*