Chapter 24

For six years, I had navigated life with a gaping hole where my history should have been. Waking up in that hospital with a fractured skull and a fabricated name, I had spent countless nights wondering who I was before the crash.

Now I knew enough to wish I didn't. I had been Ken Sterling. Garrison's wife.

But the memories that had returned weren't a life. They were fragments of its ending.

The contract, his distance. The divorce papers. The airport, the crash.

I stood frozen in the middle of my living room, staring at the unlit fireplace as those pieces circled endlessly through my mind.

No emotional attachments. No expectations. No intimacy beyond what is explicitly required.

A marriage built on conditions.

I remembered signing the contract because I loved him. I remembered trying to become someone he might eventually choose. I remembered the sterile white divorce papers sliding across the table and his perfectly cont