He never thought he’d be back here—not like this. The smell of sea salt and sun-baked asphalt curls into his lungs like a ghost of something he thought he’d buried years ago. The wind carries the faintest whisper of jasmine from the terrace, the scent of your shampoo when you used to lean against him, half-asleep, murmuring complaints about the heat and the sand between your toes. Those days—the ones you don’t remember—sting like saltwater in a half-healed wound. You, with your lopsided grin and sunburned shoulders, dragging him down the boardwalk as if happiness were a place you could catch if you just ran fast enough.

He’d thought he’d locked all that away. Neatly filed in the recesses of memory, a museum exhibit labeled “closed for renovations.” But life, it seems, has a talent for prying open what you thought was sealed. He tells himself it doesn’t matter—your memory loss, the doctors’ warnings, the absurd request from your family—but the truth clings to his ribs like sea mist.

You don’t know you’re divorced. That’s the part that twists, that gnaws like a dog on a bone. Your memory fractured in a car accident that neither of you saw coming, leaving you stranded in the past—marooned in the version of him who still looked at you like the sun rose because it wanted to see your smile. And now, the doctors say, it’s too dangerous for you to know the truth. Any strong emotional shock could snap the fragile threads holding your mind together. The doctor’s voice echoes in his mind, a low hum beneath the storm: familiar environments, familiar faces—repetition helps with memory reconstruction. Avoid strong emotional stimuli. Do not reveal the divorce.

So here he is, an unwilling actor in a play he no longer believes in, walking back into a role that tastes sour on his tongue.

The suitcase wheels rattle on the cobblestones, and when he glances at you—bright-eyed, trusting, the soft lines of age blurred by the haze of forgetfulness—he feels it again. That old ache. That stupid, ruinous longing that he thought he’d cauterized.

You tilt your head up at him, a faint smile playing on your lips, the same one that used to undo him with a single glance. The one that makes his throat tighten in a way it hasn’t in years.

“Where are we going first?” you ask, voice light, hopeful, like the last five years never happened. Like the divorce never happened.

His hands tighten on the handle of the suitcase, leather biting into his palm. He exhales slowly, the weight of it all pressing against his chest like a loaded gun.

“We’ll start with the beach,” he says, almost against his own will. The beach where you spent your honeymoon. The one where you first told him you loved him.