Catherine Spencer - The Costanzo Baby Secret

“Do you live here all the time?” she asked, her voice hushed.

“Not as a rule. Usually I’m here on the weekends only. It’s where I come to unwind.”

A shiver passed over her. “So I’ll be on my own after today?”

“No, Maeve. Until you feel more at home, I’ll stay with you.”

“In the same room and the same…bed?”

Is that what you’d like? he wanted to ask, beset by memories he almost wished he could forget. Once upon a time they had shared such insatiable passion for each other. “You have your own room for as long as you want it. But I’ll never be far away if you need me,” he said.

Catherine Spencer, once an English teacher, fell into writing through eavesdropping on a conversation about Harlequin Romances. Within two months she changed careers, and sold her first book to Mills & Boon in 1984. She moved to Canada from England thirty years ago and lives in Vancouver. She is married to a Canadian and has four grown children—two daughters and two sons (and now eight grandchildren)—plus two dogs. In her spare time she plays the piano, collects antiques, and grows tropical shrubs. You can visit Catherine Spencer’s website at www.catherinespencer.com

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AT TEN o’clock on the morning of September 4, exactly one month to the day since the accident, Dario Costanzo received a phone call he’d begun to fear would never arrive.

“I have news, signor, ” Arturo Peruzzi, chief neurologist in charge of Maeve’s case, announced. “This morning, your wife awoke from her coma.”

Sensing from the man’s neutral tone that there was more to come that didn’t bode well, Dario steeled himself to hear the rest. Over the last several weeks, he’d conducted enough research to know that brain damage resulting from a head injury came in many shapes and sizes, none of them good. “But? There is a ‘but,’ is there not, Doctor?”

“That is correct.”

He’d thought himself prepared and found he wasn’t prepared at all. Images of her as she’d looked the last time he’d seen her, with her head swathed in bandages and the rest of her hooked up to a bewildering array of tubes to keep her alive, clashed horribly with the way she’d been before everything began to go wrong.

Lovely, graceful, elegant.

Sunlight in motion.

His.

And now? Abruptly, he sat down at his desk, afraid his legs would give way beneath him. “Tell me,” he said.

“Physically she shows every sign of making a full recovery. Naturally she’s very weak at present, but with appropriate therapy, we anticipate she’ll soon be well enough to continue her convalescence at home. The problem, Signor Costanzo, is her mind.”

Ah, Dio, not that! Better she had died than—

“…not to alarm you unduly. This is quite common following the kind of trauma she sustained, and is by no means as serious as you might suppose.”

Realizing that in leaping to the worst possible conclusion, he’d missed what appeared to be a more optimistic prognosis, Dario wrenched his attention back to the neurologist’s measured tones. “Exactly what are you suggesting, Doctor?”

“I’m suggesting nothing, signor . I’m telling you bluntly that your wife is suffering from retrograde amnesia. In short, she has no memory of her…recent past.”

Peruzzi’s hesitation was brief, but telling enough to arouse Dario’s worst fears all over again. “How recent?”

“That’s what makes her case unusual. As a rule, retrograde amnesia applies only to events immediately prior to the injury. In this instance, however, your wife’s memory loss extends over a longer period. I am sorry to say that she does not appear to remember you or the life you shared.”

Psychogenic amnesia…hysterical amnesia …. Terms that had meant little or nothing to him a month ago, but with which he’d become all too familiar since, floated to the forefront of Dario’s mind. “Are you saying her amnesia is psychologically induced, as opposed to physiologically?”

“It would appear so. But the good news is that, regardless of which label we apply, the condition is rarely permanent. In time she will almost certainly regain her memory.”

“How much time?”

“That I cannot predict. No one can. It’s possible that she could recall everything within minutes of her returning to familiar territory. More likely, it will take days or even weeks, with flashes of memory trickling back in random order. What you must understand is that nothing is to be gained by trying to force her to remember that which, for whatever reason, she cannot recollect. Doing so could be highly detrimental to her well-being. And that, Signor Costanzo, brings me to the crux of this conversation. We have done our part. Now you must do yours.”

“How?”

How —the word had hounded him for over a month, begging for answers no one could give. How had he so badly misjudged the depth of her discontent? How, after all they’d promised each other, could she have turned to another man? How had she shown so little faith in him, her husband?

“Patience is the key. Bring her home when she’s ready to leave the clinic, but don’t immediately expose her to a crowd of strangers. Begin by making her feel safe and secure with you.”

“How do I do that if she doesn’t even remember me?”

“Once she is a little stronger, we’ll explain to her who you are. We have no choice. You’re her only next of kin, and she needs to know she is not alone in this world. But she has lost a year of her life, a frightening thing for anyone to face. Let her see that you care about the person she remembers herself to be. Then, as her trust in you grows, slowly reintroduce her to the rest of your family.”

“The rest of my family happens to include our seven-month-old son. What do you suggest I do with him in the meantime? Pass him off as belonging to the cook?”

If the good doctor picked up on his sarcasm, he gave no sign. “Hide him,” he said bluntly. “You have a sister and parents living close by. Surely one of them will look after him for a while?”

“Deceive her, you mean? How is that helping her?”

“The burden of guilt associated with her learning she has an infant son whom she’s wiped from her memory might well shatter her sense of worth and leave her with permanent emotional scars. It goes against the very nature of motherhood for any normal woman to forget she bore a child. Of everything that has made up the fabric of your wife’s life over the last year, this is the most delicate, and how you handle it, definitely the most critical.”

“I see.” And he did. Maeve might have woken up from her coma, but she was far from healed. “Is there anything else?”