3: 3

3.

Maybe I was still holding on to some foolish hope.

Either way, I couldn't bring myself to tell Flora to get rid of the baby.

But back in the bedroom, I finally really looked at the place. The décor was overdone, gaudy in every direction, and nothing about it matched my taste.

I opened the closet. It was packed full, all of it loud, flashy clothes.

I'd lost my memory, but a person's preferences don't just change overnight, and I knew for a fact I would never buy clothes like these.

Then the toothbrushes, the towels, the slippers. Everything came in matched pairs.

But Flora had told me plainly that we'd been together a year, and that I'd always treated her with respect.

She said even the baby only happened by accident, that she'd gotten pregnant when she came to find me because she was worried after someone set me up.

There was no way anything of hers should be in my home.

Unless...

Unless she was never my girlfriend at all. She was Jude's.

Then I thought of all her fussing over me lately, the warm little questions, the sweet memories she claimed belonged only to the two of us, and it turned my stomach.

I understood then that I had to get my memory back, and fast.

I got in touch with a well-known brain specialist in America and booked a flight, planning to fly out that same night for tests.

While I was at it, I called the private investigator and told him to look into what Flora kept calling the plot against me.

And into the women I'd been close with before.

But I'd barely finished packing when Flora caught me.

She stared at the suitcase and passport in my hands.

"Honey, the wedding's only a week away. Where do you think you're going?"

"Traveling," I said.

"The wedding doesn't need me there anyway. I'm just going to get out for a while."

Only then did she let out a breath, her voice going soft again as she took the suitcase out of my hands.

"Honey, I already told you. It's not that I don't want you at the wedding. It's just that your health right now isn't up to it."

"Here's what we'll do. I'll take you to get checked out. If the doctor says you're well enough to attend, I'll have a suit made for you overnight, all right?"

Before all this, I'd have thought Flora was gentle and thoughtful, that marrying a wife like her was the luckiest thing that could happen to a man.

But now.

Now, thinking about that warning from my future daughter on the phone, all I felt was cold.

"And if I don't want to get checked out?" I asked.

Flora didn't answer. Instead Madison came in with Jude and a doctor, her face full of disgust as she spoke.

"What kind of nonsense is that? Weren't you the one making a fuss about how you absolutely had to be at the wedding?"

"Flora's willing to give you this chance. You should be glad."

"But I don't want a physical," I said.

Jude shot me down on the spot. "How could that be true?"

"Weren't you just now making an appointment with the top brain specialist in America, planning to get properly checked out and recover your memory?"

"No need to go to all that trouble. Getting the tests done here at home is just the same."

As Jude said it, he signaled the men on either side to move in.

I tried to shout, but they clamped a hand over my mouth.

They dragged me out of the room. The servants saw it and only lowered their heads.

In that instant, I knew for certain. That call from the future was real.

Flora wasn't my fiancée, and the baby she carried wasn't mine.

All of it, every last piece, was a setup to strip me of my fortune legally and by the book.

I dug my fingers into the door frame, still trying to get a call out for help, when a cold syringe of fluid went into my body.

The next second my eyelids grew unbearably heavy, and I blacked out completely.

4: 4

4.

When I woke again, I was in a nursing facility I'd never seen before.

My hand went for my phone on instinct, but Jude was leaning in the doorway, dangling it at me.

"Looking for this?"

"Doctor's orders, big brother. You're not well. No phones for you."

"And it gets better. All these tantrums you've been throwing have made the bleeding in your brain spread fast. A week left, tops."

A week.

They wouldn't even wait one extra day.

They were going to bleed me dry and call it a wedding gift.

My hands clenched into fists. I fought down the urge to cross the room and drive one into Jude's face, and asked him instead.

"You do this, and you're not afraid of what people will say? One of you killing off her fiancé for money, the other one coveting his own brother's wife?"

Jude let out a scornful laugh.

"What people say? Does that measure up to your billion-dollar fortune?"

"Besides, you'll be dead. Even if the whole world takes your side, what exactly are they going to do about it?"

"And for the record, Flora was mine to begin with. We just borrowed her out to you for a couple of days. Don't tell me you actually believed the two of you were madly in love."

I caught the key word.

Borrowed.

In his own roundabout way, Jude had just admitted it. Flora was never my fiancée.

The child in her belly wasn't mine either.

I didn't rise to it. I just asked.

"Where are my wife and my child?"

Jude's face shifted. He didn't answer. He only said,

"You're tired, big brother. Time to rest."

Then he called the doctor in, and they pushed a syringe of something into me.

For the next two days I drifted in and out.

The few times I surfaced, it was to the sight of Flora and Jude being affectionate right in front of me.

Maybe because they knew my time was almost up, the careful pretense was gone.

I couldn't stop any of it. I could only lie there and watch them do as they pleased in front of me.

Seven days later, the wedding arrived, and my body had grown so weak I couldn't even find the strength to open my eyes.

Flora and Jude insisted on bringing me to the ceremony anyway.

"After all, big brother, this is your wedding," they said. "It just wouldn't feel complete without you there."

I knew what this was. They wanted to humiliate me, and they wanted the whole world to witness how the doting little brother and his wife grieved for their dying elder brother the moment I died.

Groundwork, so that later my estate and my "posthumous child" would fall into their hands without a single question.

The wedding went off without a hitch. My mother even produced a forged share-transfer document and read it aloud to everyone.

Proof of how grateful their paralyzed elder brother was to the younger brother caring for his wife and child.

Soon it was time for the couple to exchange rings.

Just as the two were about to slide them home, a sharp woman's voice cut clean through the ceremony.

"Wait! Flora is not Darren's wife! And the child in her belly is not Darren's either!"