I Stole His Memory and Married Him Anyway

I am Caleb Iverson's placeholder. He keeps me in a Tribeca penthouse with a doorman who logs my comings and goings on a legal pad behind the front desk.

He runs his thumb along my cheekbone, slow and admiring, and calls me by another woman's name.

Then a horse throws him at his mother's Labor Day weekend in Southampton, his helmet rolls off into the dressage ring, and the next time he opens his eyes, mine are the first ones he sees.

The neuro-oncologist asks him who I am.

I dig my thumbnail into the pad of my ring finger until I can feel the crescent open under the skin, and I smile, and I say, "I'm the woman you were halfway to the altar with, Cale. I'm Nora."

He believes me.

Later — when he loves me hard enough to pin our wedding date to the calendar in front of his mother — Sloane Whitford flies back from Fontainebleau.

And I lay two pieces of paper on the marble coffee table in front of all three of them. A Memorial Sloan Kettering pathology report. A CityMD ultrasound printout.

"Cale. I forgot to tell you. The baby and I — neither of us is going to be here long."