I had lived at that address before the crash. That heavy realization hit my chest like a physical blow. If I had resided in that apartment building for years, there had to be someone in the area who remembered the woman I used to be. Someone there might know who I was before the amnesia, and someone there might know who Lucas was back then too.
A few hours later, I confirmed through a quick phone check that Lucas had been called into work early due to a sudden staffing shortage at the medical center. The moment I knew his vehicle had safely exited the parking area, I grabbed my coat, tucked the utility bills into my purse, and left the room.
Forty minutes later, I was standing in front of a weathered red-brick apartment building located on Maple Street. I walked into the main leasing office and presented the old utility documents to a gray-haired building manager sitting behind a cluttered desk.
The man adjusted his reading glasses, took a close look at the papers, and then looked directly up at my face. His eyes widened slightly as a warm smile spread across his features.
“Jenna?” he asked softly. “Is that really you?”
My stomach dropped into a bottomless pit. “You actually remember me?”
“Of course I remember you,” he laughed, leaning back in his chair. “It has been quite a long time since I last saw you around the property.”
I quickly glanced down at the silver metallic name badge pinned to his green flannel shirt. “Mr. Palmer?”
“That’s right,” he nodded cheerfully. “You were always the main tenant I dealt with regarding the lease payments and maintenance requests.”
Then he peered past my shoulder toward the empty hallway outside the office door. “How is the new residential place treating the two of you these days?”
I instantly froze in my tracks, the room feeling suddenly ice-cold. “The two of us?”
His cheerful smile slowly faded into a look of mild concern. “You know, you and the young guy you shared the third-floor apartment with.”
“What guy are you talking about?” I asked, my voice trembling slightly.
Mr. Palmer carefully studied my intense expression for a few silent seconds. “Jenna, are you feeling completely okay right now? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
“I was involved in a very severe car crash two years ago,” I explained with extreme caution, trying to keep my breathing steady. “I suffered severe amnesia, and I honestly don’t remember living in this building at all.”
His sympathetic expression immediately changed to one of deep shock. “Oh, my goodness. I had no idea you went through something so awful.”
“How long did I actually live up in unit 3B?” I inquired desperately.
“You lived in that unit for almost three full years,” he answered without hesitation.
Three years. The specific duration echoed loudly inside my head.
“As I said, I mostly handled the apartment details directly with you,” Mr. Palmer continued thoughtfully. “I didn’t talk to him nearly as much.”
“Do you happen to remember his name?” I asked, my pulse quickening dramatically.
He scratched his chin, pulling at his gray beard as he searched his memory. “It was something short. Luke, Lucas, something along those lines.”
My heart stopped completely. “Lucas?”
“Yes, that was definitely it,” he nodded firmly. “Lucas.”
“Who lives in unit 3B right now?” I asked, leaning heavily against his wooden desk for physical support.
“Nobody lives in there,” he answered, shaking his head.
I stared at him in utter confusion. “Nobody?”
“That’s the stranger part,” he explained, lowering his voice. “The apartment has remained completely vacant ever since your accident, but someone has continuously paid the full monthly rent on time every single month.”
I felt an icy chill spread rapidly down my spine. “I have been paying for it?”
“Not you personally,” he clarified, pulling up a digital file on his desktop computer screen. “The automated rental payments have been transferring over from a completely different banking account every single month.”
“Whose account is it?” I pressed, holding my breath.
“I honestly have no idea,” he shrugged nonchalantly. “As long as the monthly funds cleared the system without any issues, I never had a real business reason to investigate the owner.”
Someone had been paying a massive sum of money every single month just to keep my old life completely frozen in time, exactly where I had left it.
Why on earth had Lucas never mentioned this apartment to me? Why had he repeatedly insisted that we were complete strangers who met by chance in a hospital ward, when we had actually shared an apartment on Maple Street for almost three years? And what horrifying secrets were still locked away inside that vacant living space?
I looked directly at the landlord with pleading eyes. “Do you still happen to have a spare master key for unit 3B?”
PART 4
Five minutes later, Mr. Palmer’s brass spare key turned smoothly inside the heavy deadbolt lock of apartment 3B.
The front door swung open with a quiet creak, revealing a space frozen in time. A thick layer of gray dust covered every flat surface in the entryway, and several half-packed cardboard boxes were stacked haphazardly against the far wall. There was no obvious, glaring answer waiting for me in the middle of the floor, but on the mantelpiece above the cold fireplace, I spotted several framed photographs lining the shelf.
I slowly walked across the room and began picking up the dusty frames one by one.
The very first photograph showed me standing knee-deep in the rolling surf on a bright ocean beach. I was wearing a beautiful white sundress, my light hair was significantly longer, and my left leg was completely healthy and unscarred. I stared intently at the radiant woman in the picture, waiting desperately for a sudden flood of past memories to return to my blank mind. Nothing happened.
I turned over a second photograph, depicting a cheerful holiday dinner with a group of smiling strangers. Still, no emotional recognition washed over me.
However, the third photograph gave me something far more profound and alarming than a simple restored memory. It provided absolute visual proof of the dark lie I had been living for the past two years.
The picture showed Lucas down on one knee on a romantic wooden pier, holding up a small black box. I was standing directly in front of him with both of my hands pressed tightly over my mouth in pure shock, and a gleaming diamond engagement ring caught the soft sunlight on my left hand.
I stared at the image with wide, horrified eyes. It was the exact same custom diamond engagement ring that Lucas had given me eighteen months ago in his living room—the very ring he had proudly claimed to have searched high and low for at a high-end jewelry store after falling in love with me post-accident.
My hands began to tremble so violently that I nearly dropped the glass frame onto the dusty floor. I flipped the picture over to look at the back, where a handwritten date was clearly inscribed in dark blue ink.
The date was from exactly two years before my car crash.
Lucas had not met me for the first time in the trauma ward. We had already been deeply involved in a long-term relationship. We had already been living together in this very apartment, and we had already been actively planning our upcoming wedding long before I ever lost my memory.
The man I had trusted blindly, the man I believed had unexpectedly entered my life as a gentle guardian angel after I had lost everything, had actually been my fiancé long before the tragic crash occurred.
Directly beneath the collection of dusty photographs on the mantelpiece, I discovered an old, discarded cell phone tucked inside an unsealed envelope. The screen was dark and completely unresponsive when I pressed the side button. I quickly found a matching charging cable in one of the open boxes, plugged it into a nearby wall outlet, and set the device on the counter.
While I waited anxiously for the battery to receive enough power to turn on, I stood alone in the quiet apartment and stared down at the engagement photograph.
“I need you to tell me the truth,” I whispered softly to the silence of the empty room. “I need to know what really happened to us.”
When the old phone screen finally illuminated with a soft buzz, I unlocked the device and immediately began scrolling through the archive of old text messages. Most of the conversations were mundane exchanges with co-workers and local delivery services, but then one specific contact name caused my thumb to freeze over the glass.
Hannah.
It was the very same name that I had found crossed out with thick black lines in my leather notebook.
My heart started racing at a dangerous speed. I quickly copied her ten-digit phone number into my current cell phone screen. Before I could allow fear to talk me out of taking action, I pressed the call button and brought the receiver to my ear.
The line rang four long times before someone finally picked up on the other end.
“Hello?” a woman’s soft voice answered tentatively.
“Hannah?” I managed to say, my breath catching in my throat.
There was a long, painful silence on the line.
“It’s Jenna,” I added, my voice cracking with emotion.
Another heavy stretch of complete silence followed. I could hear the faint sound of her shallow breathing over the line before she finally let out a dramatic, ragged gasp.
“Oh, my God,” Hannah whispered, her tone thick with disbelief. “Jenna? Is it truly you? I honestly didn’t think I would ever hear your voice ever again.”
“I don’t remember what happened between the two of us back then,” I explained honestly, sitting down on the edge of an old sofa. “I lost two years of my memory in the crash, but I desperately need you to tell me what took place before I wrecked my car.”
Hannah hesitated, her hesitation practically humming through the phone line. “Does Lucas know that you are calling me right now?”
“No, he has no idea,” I replied firmly. “Please, Hannah. Tell me the truth.”
She let out a long, shuddering exhale before she began to speak. “A few days before your terrible accident, Lucas and I got foolishly drunk together after a late party,” she confessed, her voice shaking with heavy guilt. “We were left entirely alone in his car outside the venue.”
My stomach twisted into a agonizing knot. “You slept with my fiancé?”
“Yes,” Hannah sobbed quietly into the receiver. “It only happened that one single time, Jenna, and we both instantly regretted it. We promised each other that we were going to sit down and tell you the absolute truth together, but neither of us could muster up the courage to do it right away.”
My throat tightened so severe that I could barely swallow. “So what happened on the night of the crash?”
“The night you had the accident, you somehow found our old text messages on his tablet while he was taking a shower,” Hannah explained, her words spilling out through tears. “You realized everything right then and there.”
Until that exact moment, I had spent two years believing that my car accident was simply a tragic, random twist of fate that ended my old life. Now I finally understood that it was the catastrophic climax of Lucas’s ultimate betrayal.
“And then what happened?” I asked softly, bracing myself for the rest of the painful story.
“You called my phone screaming and crying, completely devastated,” Hannah recalled, her voice breaking entirely. “You threw your things into your car and sped away into the storm. I literally begged you over the phone not to drive in that state.”
I stared blankly at the dusty floorboards beneath my feet. “And Lucas?”
“He jumped into his own vehicle and chased directly after you,” Hannah revealed.
“What?” I gasped.
“Lucas followed you right out onto the highway,” she confirmed.
For one terrifying second, absolute silence filled my mind. Then, like a sudden lightning strike in the dark, something fractured inside my brain. It was not a complete, orderly restoration of my past, but rather a violent burst of sensory fragments.
Blinding rain hammering violently against a driver’s side windshield.
Bright, glaring headlights filling my rearview mirror completely.
