Chapter 12 - The Groom’s MemoryAdrian stepped toward Jenna.
“I remember a voice.”
Jenna watched him carefully.
“During surgery?”
“Before.”
He touched the faint scar beneath his collar.
“I was unconscious most of the time, but there were moments when I could hear people.”
Silas’s face softened.
Adrian continued.
“Someone kept telling me to stay.”
Jenna’s breath caught.
Trauma patients often remembered fragments inaccurately. Sounds became dreams. Faces became shadows.
But she had spoken to him while preparing him for surgery.
“Your father was trying to reach the hospital,” she said. “We didn’t know who you were yet.”
“What did you say?”
Jenna hesitated.
“That you weren’t allowed to leave before someone came looking for you.”
Adrian closed his eyes.
The memory returned in pieces.
Cold hands.
White lights.
Pressure on his chest.
A woman’s voice refusing to let him disappear.
Felicity had once repeated similar words to him at the gala.
She claimed she had learned them from a nurse who worked nearby.
Now Adrian understood where she had found them.
The letter.
Silas’s description.
Perhaps conversations overheard in the Hale townhouse.
Felicity had taken the voice that followed him through nightmares and placed herself behind it.
Adrian opened his eyes.
“You knew those words mattered to me.”
Felicity wiped at her tears.
“I wanted to comfort you.”
“You wanted me to connect you to the person who saved me.”
“I became the person who loved you.”
“By lying about who you were.”
Felicity recoiled.
Jenna felt no triumph.
Only sadness.
A marriage was collapsing before hundreds of guests, and somewhere inside the wreckage stood a woman who had believed being chosen justified every theft.
Adrian looked at Jenna.
“Thank you.”
She shook her head.
“You do not owe me your life.”
“No.”
His eyes moved toward Felicity.
May you like
“But I owed the truth a place in it.”
👉 Adrian finally remembered Jenna’s voice, and Felicity could no longer separate the love story from the deception that created it.
