Sweet Romance15 min read
I Came Back, and He Was Waiting
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I woke up with a roaring headache and a mind that felt like an emptied room. The day before my wedding, everything should have been certain; instead, memory was a thief who had taken my past and left me a stranger to myself. The oddest thing arrived with the headache: other people’s unspoken words filled the air, clear as a bell. I could hear hearts like television channels switching without a remote.
I sat up, reached for the wallet on the small table, and found my ID. My name—Nova Carpenter—was printed there. I should have felt relief. Instead, a small voice said, "She’s back."
"Who said that?" I whispered aloud, because talking seemed safer than hearing voices.
A faint, annoyed voice floated near the door. "Small heartless one, you finally came back."
I froze. Then I realized the voice had not been spoken aloud—it belonged to the man in the next room, or rather to the man whose presence hovered like a lamp through the wall. He called himself Viktor Osborne by the stern line of his thought: "You still managed to come back."
"Who—who is Viktor Osborne?" I asked the empty room, though his name had already arrived in my head like a label on a coat.
"You know better than me," another private voice complained, smaller, tired. "You used to be right here. You left and I hated every minute."
It took me a moment to understand what was happening: the rush of words were not mine, but voices of people nearby, and my brain had tuned to them like a radio. At first I thought I had gone mad. Then I remembered the market, the grass, the man who made me fall over the bags. A ridiculous memory—red dates spilled like small moons onto the dirt—snapped into place.
"Stop," I told myself. "Think."
It dawned slow and clear: two years ago I’d woken in a hospital with no past. Someone kind—someone who said he was from my county—had taken me home and given me shelter. Egan Baker was the name stitched into the life I had been living, the man everyone called my fiancé. Or had called that. I had planned to marry him tomorrow. I had been terrified. I had been comforted. I had been told my parents were gone. I had been safe and small and obedient. I had been fed stories that made sense.
And then, by accident, on the market stall under an old sun, a new thing happened: I heard people’s inner words. It was a trick of my brain at first, then a wild power: other people’s private sentences came out loud in my head.
I practiced it like a game. The two old ladies gossiping by the gate—their lips didn’t move, but their thoughts popped like fruit: "She always takes my seat," "Her hair is thinner than mine." My hands, sticky with date sugar, trembled. I felt the world like a map with new ink.
I went back to the house. Egan’s voice brushed me like coarse felt: "You still decided to come back."
"Who are you?" I asked aloud when he appeared. He looked at me with a face I had thought soft for two years. He was casual in the way of men who think they own the air in the room.
"You came back," he said, and his private voice slipped into my ears like a secret: "Little heartless, do you know how long I've searched? Don't you know how long I’ve traced every hospital? If you hadn’t come back, Flower would have had a third pup already."
I blinked. "You've been looking for me?" I asked, stunned, because his mouth did not say that out loud.
He bristled, then laughed too loud. "Of course! I would never—"
But his thoughts were rude and sharp: "If I had not married her, maybe I could have married someone who keeps house and brings me heirs." His eyes hardened. The apartment smelled of stale smoke though this was a smoke-free building. He flicked a lighter, and the cigarette hissed like a secret.
My knees gave. Someone in the hallway said on the inside, "Look at her, pretty face, what a shame she’s useless." The words were not polite. My hands found the ID again and clutched it like a talisman. Something in me snapped.
I packed coins, some photos, and whatever small things had been left in the drawer. I hid the goods I had bought that morning—dates, peanuts, dried fruits—behind a roadside grass mound, and I fled for the train.
The sound of the train was a long, steady hush. I watched villages slip by and felt raw and unreal edges of my life reassemble in slow, soft clicks: hospitals, a village that smelled of river mud, a man who had been kind. But kindness did not mean truth.
At the train station of the city I had been told was mine—Kyoto, the buzzing name of bright lights and glass—my palms trembled. I went to the company that had my name in their files. The door unlocked like an invitation. "Authentication success. Welcome back," a machine announced. I was led in by a voice that carried the memory like a rope.
I slept in the company’s resting room because the bed looked safe. At dawn I woke to a warm pressure against my waist. A man's breath fogged over me like a warm corner of the world. I froze, pulling the blanket tight, absolutely, horribly vulnerable.
Someone banged on the door. "Zhou—" a distant voice began, then stopped with a change of tone because whoever it was made a mistake. My heart tripped.
When the door opened, a man stood in the doorway who was frightening to look at and gentle by accident. Viktor Osborne's face held winter—sharp jaw, neat hair—but then a softer thing: a flicker that looked like worry, like having carried a weight for a long time. His voice was a dry stone. "You came back."
And then, leaning forward as if complaining to a small spoiled child who had run away and returned with mud on her shoes, another voice—surprisingly playful, almost childlike—whispered, "You little heartless, you know how long I waited? If you hadn't come back, Flower would have had a third pup." The phrase had been said before; my ears knew it. It was a private, odd tenderness.
I stared. "You’ve been looking for me?"
He sat down, untouched by the bright lights of the company. "You still remember this name?" he asked softly, and his mind said, "Seven hundred thirty-four days and fourteen hours. I counted. I didn’t want to believe they'd given you a funeral."
I felt dizzy with something like relief and something like betrayal. Relief that a person had missed me. Betrayal that someone else had been using me like a pawn.
"Thank you," I whispered before I understood the weight of the word.
Viktor's fingers tightened on my chin. He looked like a man who had practiced kindness in private and kept his face for duty. "You think I want you to be grateful?" he grunted, but his inner voice landed like a soft thing: "You came back. If money or status or anger brought you back, I don't care. You're here."
That gentleness unlocked something sharp and warm in my ribs. I laughed—an odd, wet sound that made him flinch.
We did not have much time to untangle the years at once. The hospital guesses were blunt: my brain was healthy, but memory might take its own sweet time. I should have been terrified. Instead I felt uncanny calm in Viktor’s company. He stayed, even when he said he could not; he left, promising to return; he guarded with a stubborn, private tenderness that was louder than the brash announcements of his company.
"You're mine," he said once, as if he were making a grocery list. "Don't leave."
I stared. "Call me what you want," I teased, because hearing his voice when he stumbled over warmth felt like finding a secret room. "Call me your wife."
He reddened, like a boy caught with a forbidden candy. "Wife?" he mumbled, but his inner voice chirped absurdly, "Wife, wife, wife—why does it sound so right?"
We learned each other in small slices. He taught me to use a phone like someone handing me a magic wand. I taught him that games could be a way to laugh. We had small, clumsy intimacy around an office game console, the exact kinds of moments that knit two people into a private language.
"You're terrible at this," he said as my in-game character scampered poorly across a battlefield.
"I am thriving," I replied. "I call it—independent play."
He watched me and sighed something that was not a complaint: "You were always reckless."
Here, among spreadsheets and late-night texts and a dog named Flower who greeted me as if I were the center of a small, perfect sun, my heart learned to skip and then to land.
Three small heart-fluttering moments that were simple and true proved it to me:
1) One evening when rain thundered and he shoved a hot cup into my hands and said, "Drink. You always forget water when you're thinking." He never said it to anyone else that soft way, and his voice in my head added: "I noticed."
2) The first time he laughed at my terrible joke in front of his boardroom—he covered his mouth with surprise and then looked at me like I’d stolen a private treasure.
3) When he wrapped his jacket around me on a windy evening and his fingers brushed my hair: "Don't get sick." The thought—unshared, burr-like—was small and precious.
There was also the grim part of the story: I had nearly married Egan Baker, who had been pretending to love me for his gain. He had been cruelly practical, and Jacqueline Gao—an ambitious woman with hands that liked power—had been his co-conspirator. Together they had plotted to trap me away from my world, to make me marry and vanish under a varnish of comfort, taking money and reputations as if they were easy things to pluck. They had been confident and comfortable in their lies.
I told Viktor, and he turned from warmth to a cold I had not seen earlier. "We will fix it," he said in a voice that left no room for argument.
"How?"
"You will stand beside me at the wedding. We will invite them. We will be open. We will let the truth come to light."
His plan was quiet and precise, like a machine shifting gears. We rehearsed little scenes. We recorded conversations. We bribed an unwilling family member of Egan's—Lucia Lambert, an assistant whose morals were cheaper than her needs—who sold us screenshots, voice notes, proof that Egan had been orchestrating my false life with Jacqueline Gao's help. Journey Gibbs, who had been hired as help in the house and turned into my ally, stood at my shoulder and whispered plans.
"Are you sure?" she said. "Public scenes are messy."
"I'm not scared," I answered. "I can hear their thoughts. I can see the rustle before the storm."
The wedding—the rehearsed, public ceremony where my name would be fixed to Viktor's by vows—was the theater for everything. We invited them, and they came with smiles like knives.
The banquet hall hummed with the kind of light that felt slick and true. I walked in with Viktor at my elbow, red dress heavy and real. My heart thudded: not with fear of marrying him—I had chosen to—but with the knowledge that tonight would unmask those who had lied to my life. The hall smelled of lilies and food, of expensive cologne. Cameras flashed like small intrusive moths.
Egan sat with Jacqueline at a corner table, hands folded as if in prayer. Their eyes were bright with cunning. Jacqueline’s smile was an elegant thing, too clean for honesty. Kiara Sauer—the woman who had been placed in Viktor’s father’s life by Jacqueline to sabotage our union years ago—leaned in and mouthed fragile threats like a cat.
I stood at the altar beside Viktor and felt his hand cover mine. "You ready?" his thought asked, quiet and sure.
"Yes," I answered, out loud. Then, because betrayals deserve to be named, I turned toward Egan and Jacqueline and said, "You should stand too. This is your piece."
The microphone was in my hand and my voice did not shake. "Ladies and gentlemen," I said. "Before we declare vows, I must tell the truth."
Scoffs rippled like sheets. Jacqueline's face flickered from silk to stone.
"And what truth would that be?" Egan asked, voice light like pretending.
"That these two conspired to hide my past, to keep me from remembering who I really was, to manipulate my life for money and position." My words landed like iron.
The room's air shifted. "If you have proof," Egan said, too smiling, "produce it."
I clicked my phone. "This." I played the recorded calls and messages—Egan's planning tones, Jacqueline's sharp directives, Kiara's bragging. Lucia Lambert, as promised, stood in the doorway with packets of evidence and an express confession recorded on a shaky handphone.
"What is this?" Kiara cried, her voice thin.
"Proof," Viktor said. He pushed a folder across the table to the hotel manager and the elders and the crowd. "This is why your behavior at the time made no sense. This is why Nova's identity was removed and sold like an item."
Egan's practiced calm cracked into a jagged line. "You have no right—"
"You had the right to try," Viktor answered coldly. "You did not have the right to destroy a life."
Voices rose around the hall. People whispered, then demanded explanations. The hotel's manager, a pragmatic man, came forward. "These are serious allegations," he said. "We need to call the authorities."
That was the sound of the trap closing. Egan's face tightened into small knots of panic. He looked to Jacqueline, who had the terrible composure of someone who believes things can always be smoothened over. Now there was nothing to smoothen.
"Egan!" Jacqueline hissed, "Act normal. Say we are slandered."
"It’s true, we did nothing wrong," Egan croaked, but his face had gone a pale, fragile thing. The crowd had begun to turn, whispers like knives.
"Everyone, please listen," I said. "We have messages, recorded payments, and witnesses. I was told I was someone else. I was told to stay away from the places and people who belonged to me."
Someone near the tables produced a phone and began to livestream. The crowd smelled of greed, of curiosity, of the small cruel joy of watching a downfall. In the second row, a woman clapped slowly—the sound like a single, judgmental spoon. "Finally," she mouthed. "Finally I get to see the truth."
Egan's denial moved from reasoned to animal. "You're lying! All of this is a setup."
"Then why did your own messages plan when and how to get me back into a marriage certificate?" Viktor asked. "Why did Jacqueline instruct you to take my ID? Why did Kiara boast about delaying the meeting between us back then?"
The hotel manager had already been called. Within minutes, uniformed officers arrived, awkward in their presence but precise in their duty. They held the proof and read the formal words that make collusion into law.
"Mr. Baker," one officer said, "you are under suspicion of unlawful confinement and fraud. Ms. Gao, you are suspected of conspiracy and attempt to cause injury."
Egan's face drained of all color—caught, finally, like an insect in wax. He reached for Jacqueline's hand as if for a raft. "We can explain," he begged, voice wet and small.
"Explain," I said, and I lifted my chin. "Tell everyone what you told the doctors. Tell them how you made me believe I had no past. Tell them you planned a life for me without my consent."
"This is not the place," Jacqueline said, voice sharp as glass. "You have a personal grudge—"
"Is it a grudge to want your life back?" I asked. My voice, which had trembled at the train station two days ago, was steady.
The crowd pressed, phones out, a tide of bright glass and hungry eyes. People who once nodded when Egan passed now gasped and stepped back. The social tide turned like weather.
Egan's expressions layered through stages I had practiced watching in small films: first brave composure, then stunned surprise, then denial bubbling up into fragile lies, then a slow, animal panic as the net closed. He lunged for the manager, demanded to see receipts, scrawled legal jargon. People began to murmur about arrests and sympathy.
"Please, I—" he stammered, "This is slander. We never—"
"Stand down," the officer said. He moved with the authority of the law and the certainty that until proven, he must follow procedure. "Sir, you are to come with us for questioning."
Egan's face convulsed. "You can't, not in front of everyone—"
There were shouts. Some cheered, some jeered. A woman near the front recorded everything, voice loud with a public triumph: "He deserves it! He cheated her!"
Jacqueline crumpled into a curl of fury and humiliation. Her hands fluttered like a trapped bird. "You can't ruin my reputation," she cried, reaching out like a child. "This is slander."
"This is the truth," I answered plainly. The officers cuffed Egan, whose eyes met mine for a fraction of a second: fear, then shame. He went from loud denier to small man in a heartbeat. He begged, he pleaded, he swore—but the crowd watched, cameras flashing like rain.
Jacqueline's undoing was different, more theatrical. The evidence against her was not merely collusion but intent: messages boasting of removing me from the picture, recordings of her telling Egan exactly how to make me passive, and the financial transfers that tied her to the doctor who had falsified my records. She put on a performance of brittle indignation and then of denial. I watched the mask slip: indignation became rage; rage became pleas; pleas then splintered into the desperate face of someone who had misread the world.
"People are whispering you wanted to go farther," someone yelled. "You endanger people's lives for your schemes!"
Jacqueline's reaction finished the scene. She shrieked and then broke into a hard, sharp laugh—laugh that didn't reach her eyes. "You have no idea what you're saying," she insisted, and then she reached for a retainer of influence—phone calls, a crying plea, words meant to buy the moment.
Then a man from Viktor's father’s staff placed on the table a folder recovered from Kiara Sauer’s hidden phone: pictures, recordings, messages where Kiara had celebrated manipulation, calling our wedding a pawn game she had taught in class. The audience's sympathy shifted again. Kiara, who had practiced being the grieving second wife for years, had to fold her palms and pretend to be shocked. In truth, her face showed the collapse of someone who had believed she was above consequence.
When the captains took Jacqueline and Egan toward the side doors, their behaviors diverged. Egan's bravado had been smashed into small, earnest bargaining. "Please—" he begged to anyone who would listen. His voice scrambled through the throng and hit me like rain.
Jacqueline turned, mouth pursed, and spat venom at me. "You'll regret this," she hissed. "You think you won? You have no idea the people I've slept with to get ahead."
The room recoiled. Someone laughed. "You mean slept with to get ahead?" a stranger said and the laugh became louder and meaner.
"Do you expect us to feel sorry for you?" another voice asked. "You took a life and made it someone else's."
"As they escorted Jacqueline away," I wrote down in my head like a closing line of a play, "her face unravelled: from certainty to a twitch of denial, to a pleading plea that fell on the crowd. She reached out to Viktor's father's lapel and then to his shoes, seeking a tether. No one took it. She tried to be small and then big. The crowd's phones recorded the shred of her dignity."
The crowd watched, recorded, and the social punishment was complete—no jail sentence could make a scene like this. People snapped photos and uploaded them to feeds like arrows. Comments rolled: "How could they?" "Justice at last." "She looked so proud and now—" The internet did the rest. The public humiliation continued beyond the hotel doors.
Egan and Jacqueline's private descent played like a slow motion trainwreck. Their faces changed the whole way: at first claiming innocence, then sputtering, then angry, then frantic. They shouted at each other like children. They slumped when officers read their rights and the handcuffs clicked. The wedding hall erupted in mixed applause and relief.
A woman near us—an old neighbor of Viktor's—sobbed quietly and then clapped. "Good riddance," she whispered. Another guest took Egan's empty seat and left a single napkin on the chair like a mark. Somebody filmed the officers escorting them out; the footage went viral before my table ordered dessert.
When the noise subsided, Viktor put a hand on my palm and said softly, "You did the right thing."
"You did," I corrected. "We did."
We went back to our vows, less shaky now because the masquerade had fallen. When Viktor lifted my hand to his lips, it was not a show. Behind us, the room had witnessed the unraveling, and on every phone around, people whispered verdicts.
After that night the legal system finished what the crowd had started. Evidence was handed in and compiled. Egan faced charges of fraud and unlawful confinement; Jacqueline faced conspiracy and attempted harm. Kiara was implicated and lost her social standing. The way it happened felt correct: public exposure, legal consequence, and the unglamorous slow fall of reputations that do not withstand proof.
There is a particular scene I cannot forget because it had been so vividly human: when Egan, who had spent months pretending to be the wounded lover, found himself crushed and weeping in an interrogation room. He shouted at the ceiling—"I was trying to secure my future!"—then his voice fell and something like shame shivered through him. The officers watched with bored professionalism. People who had once called him "promising" at club dinners now saw him small and scared. A dozen people had filmed his descent with the detached curiosity of a crowd at a street performance.
Jacqueline's finale was more theatrical. She entered court with a face of silk and then left with the stain of public disgrace. Her performance devolved into denial, then overbearing anger, then a brittle apology that cut like cheap glass. The witnesses recounted her words aloud. The courtroom buzzed like a hive. When the gavel struck and her sentence was read—reparations and restriction orders included—she faltered, and the sensation of a toppling pedestal was final.
I had expected satisfaction; instead the feeling was quieter: a gentle, steady relief.
Viktor and I rebuilt quiet things together. He held me when memories returned: small, surprising images—a child’s game in a sunlit yard, a photograph album with boys in ribbons, the limp of a shoe in rain. I grew back toward myself with someone steady by my side. We married properly, with red paper and promise, not because the world demanded it but because we wanted to mark a new start.
"Promise me one silly thing," he said once when we held hands on a messy Sunday, paint on our fingers from a shelf we were building for Flower’s toys.
"What's that?"
"That you'll never call yourself heartless," he said, and his mind chimed, "Because god, I am ridiculous about you."
I laughed and kissed him. The joke between us was private and solid.
A lifetime of small things followed—the kind of scenes a life is made of: lazy Sunday breakfasts, stolen kisses over paperwork, his involuntary snort when I got the punchline wrong. The world did not unspool into sudden perfection—there were bills, arguments about trivial things, and sometimes my memory still hiccupped—but we navigated with patience and an uneven grace.
The final moment I will keep like a charm from the whole long storm is this: months later at the same hotel where the wedding had been, someone pointed out to me a little table of guests who had watched the temptation of cruelty and had chosen laughter. Viktor squeezed my hand. His thought slipped into my head: "You were always someone I wanted." I smiled.
"Then say it," I teased.
He leaned over, close enough that his breath warmed my ear, and said outwardly, "Marry me?" and inwardly with a private, very soft certainty, "You were always mine."
I answered with the voice that had found itself again: "I already did."
The End
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