Page 76 of Wished

I hit his chest with a small thud, and then he wraps his arms around me.

His eyes are still brimming with laughter as he looks down at me. “Did I mention today how happy you make me? You always make me laugh.” His hands spread over my back, holding me close. “When we met?—”

“At the art museum?” I ask, wondering if he has the same memories as he did before.

“Yes,” he says, his hand stroking along the curve of my back. “I knew within seconds of seeing you that I was going to marry you. It was love at first sight. Luckily, you didn’t make me wait too long.”

Oh gosh.He’s giving me that look again. The “I love you till death” look.

The hard part is I’ve always wanted him to look at me like this. I just wanted him to do it of his own free will. For three years he saw me cleaning his house. There was never any love at first sight. He loved Fiona, not me.

“What about Fiona?” I ask.

“Fiona who?”

When I first made the wish, Max told me he’d called Fiona and she’d said, “Max who?” He was devastated. She’d been his best friend for nearly a decade. And now he doesn’t remember her either.

“You love her.”

“I love you,” he says.

“In the real world, you love her.”

“Impossible.”

I step back, breaking free of his arms. “No. It’s not. In the real world, I clean your house and you ... you ignore me. There wasn’t any love at first sight.”

“If I saw you, no matter what reality we were in, I loved you. Trust me.” His expression says he’s so confident of this fact there’s no way I’ll change his mind.

I drop my head, looking down at the wood floor sparkling in the late-morning sun. My shoulders fall. “This isn’t right,” I say, my fingers curling into my palms. “You don’t love me. You think you do, but you don’t. You never had a choice.” I look back at him—at his concerned expression and his wrinkled brow. “You and I both know what’s most important is having a choice.”

He reaches out, brushing a strand of hair behind my ear. “Not true,” he says. “There’s no choice in love. The second I saw you I fell hard. The only choice I had was whether or not I was going to acknowledge it, and then, what I was going to do about it.”

I shake my head. “I wish that were true.”

He takes my hands, unfolds my curled fingers, and clasps them with his. “It is true, no wish needed.”

My chest feels hollow and his words echo around it, banging off my ribs and knocking into my heart. They hurt.

Maybe he does love me. Maybe after last night he did. But he never said the words. He made his choice. He told me to come to him, remind him of his letter, remind him of what love was. But that was when he expected to forget me or to forget that he liked me.

What am I supposed to do now, when the opposite of what we believed would happen did?

I wish I could ask his advice.

I clutch his hands and he smiles down at me. I’m struck by the fact that our pose right now is just the same as it was in our wedding photo on the nightstand.

In Max’s mind we’ve been together for seven years. He’s my friend. My confidant. My lover. My husband.

Maybe Icanask him for advice.

“If you did believe me,” I begin, “that this isn’t reality and we aren’t truly married. That we didn’t really speak until a few days ago. What would you do?”

He thinks for a moment, his thoughts flowing, his mind working. Then he finally asks, “Was I happy in this other reality? Were you?”

“Happy?”

He nods. “Were you happy?”

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