Blank Slate Kate

Chapter 34

Torn into her and me. "Ethan. You're so right. Torn down the middle. We are two people. I'm who she would have been if the whole mess hadn't happened."  

He leans back in his chair and looks at me. "You're not Donna, that's for sure."

I blink, surprised and a little hurt. "Why do you say that?"

"I haven't had such an open conversation with Donna in... ever. She always had her walls up, making sure she didn't say too much. I thought she was just like that with me, but now I doubt it. But you, you'll talk to me. Tell me things. To be honest, it's kind of refreshing."

I nod, glad he doesn't hate me for taking his sister away. "I've heard that from Ryan and other people, that I'm more open."

"Donna was hiding, all the time." He looks at me sadly. "Can't have been much of a life."

Nope. No wonder she ran away from it.

We sit quietly for a long moment, both considering the pain and fear Donna must have lived in, then he says, "Anything else? Does he know when she was born? Or her name?"

"Her birthday is February twenty-seventh, not even a week before the last ECT treatment. She'd have been..." My throat tightens and I have to clear it before I finish the sentence. "She turned fourteen this year."

Ethan blinks hard, and I look away to give him time to recover and also to make sure he doesn't make me start crying. I can not imagine how agonizing that day must have been for Donna. Every day, frankly, but the date the child she gave up was born?

"She must have been thinking so hard about the baby," Ethan says quietly. "Right before the treatment. Could that be why..."

I shrug. "I'll ask my therapist but I can kind of see it. If she was thinking about it, and that definitely seems likely to me, maybe those memories got disconnected by the treatment."

He frowns. "Disconnected?"

I explain how the memories, according to Doctor Ferraro, are still stored but I've lost the key to get at them, and he says, "Makes sense, I guess. And the name? Did he know?"

When I asked that question Ryan paused for a painfully long time, and it hit me that it might have been Kate. Could she really have planned to reuse the name she gave her first child for the one she wanted to have with Ryan? But no. I have to clear my throat again. "It's Grace." I open my wallet and show him the fortune his sister carried around. "There's one like this in Donna's desk drawer too."

"Live with grace," he reads from the paper. "She couldn't live with her but she couldn't let her go either. Kate, you're breaking my heart. My poor sister."

"I know. It's no wonder she ran away, is it? How did she survive it?"

"Brick walls everywhere. Keeping everyone out. I have to admit, while I'm horrified for Donna I do feel for Ryan too. It can't have been easy finding out your wife kept something like that from you."

I'm not sure how to respond to this. I did push Ryan on his reaction and he admitted that he'd been furious for a while but claimed he'd eventually been able to understand and accept it. I couldn't see how, frankly, and I told him so, which led to him saying he'd done his best. But not long after, Donna had gone downhill like a race car with no brakes, dropping so deep into depression that even ECT hadn't brought her out. So his best hadn't been good enough, his attempt at forgiving Donna hadn't gone far enough. And he knew it.

"I think," I say, "that it changed everything for them. Forever."

"And you two?" He studies me. "Has it changed things for you?"

The tears I've been fighting all evening rise again. "I don't know. I'm beyond angry that he didn't tell me before. It might have brought everything back for me. But then again, it didn't bring it back, and now that I know how dreadful everything was for them both I can see why he kept it to himself and why he didn't want to see me. I'm a reminder of what went wrong, what he did wrong. When he sees me, he sees how far Donna ran to get away from him."

"So, that's it? You're getting divorced?"

I sniff. "I don't know. I guess so." Though a throat tight with tears, I say, "But I love him. I don't remember any of the bad times and I love him. But he'll always remember them so I guess..." I have to bite my lip to keep myself under control.

He gives my hand an awkward pat. "Too bad the ECT didn't erase his memories too, eh?"

"Yeah. Too bad."

**

Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you’re enjoying Kate's story. The next chapter will be uploaded on Tuesday! :) (Please note - I'm working really hard on another book and am behind on comments here - but I hugely appreciate them! :)

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