Page 34 of Forever is Now

Robert Hayden: It was, because I’d become Robert. I’d really grabbed hold of that identity, made it my own, because I didn’t have anything else. And it felt like this massive loss. Like something huge had been ripped away from me. Everything, taken. And I was left with what felt like nothing. Not knowing who I was again. Because although I’d never remembered my life as Robert, I was still him. I’d lived as him for six years.

I was engaged to Mia, and she was going to become Mia Hayden, and it was all just... such a mess.

Mia was confused and angry—she thought at first that I’d tricked her. But I hadn’t. I hadn’t tried to deceive anyone. She said she still loved me though, that we’d find out what had happened.

And of course, I was still part of her family. We had kids together. Another on the way. But she and I spent ages trying to find who I was. We figured I was English, because of my accent—even though I had now developed an Australian twang—and so we began looking and looking for any missing English men.

It felt ridiculous at first, and it also made me question why I’d not done this before. Why I’d just accepted I was Robert.

But Mia said to me, “You wouldn’t question it though, would you? Someone gives you a passport, says it’s yours, says your Robert Hayden but you’ve had an accident that’s affected your memory, you’re not going to question it.”

And I said, “I suppose so.”

But I still felt guilty—like deep inside I’d known, even though I hadn’t.

It wasn’t just guilt about that though. Guilt about the real Robert Hayden. Where was he? What had happened for that man to go missing? Was he dead? Had me stepping into his shoes meant that no one would actually look for him? Could he have been saved?

To this day, we still don’t know what happened to the real Robert. And that keeps me awake at night, often more than anything. I feel haunted... by him, maybe, I don’t know. Haunted by something. Like I played a huge part in this crime against him. I stole his life, because I didn’t have one of my own.

I tried talking about this to Mia soon after we learned that I couldn’t be Robert, but she snapped at me. I mean, it’s not fair to say that about her, like, she’s been amazing. She was pregnant too, of course. And this was all a lot of stress and shock.

She just told me not to worry about who Robert Hayden was. To worry about who I was.

And then we read about Ruari Braddon.

[Silence for five seconds]

Robert Hayden: It was weird—because I knew immediately that I probably was him. Ruari Braddon. Not that I felt a connection to the name or that any of my memory came back. It didn’t. There was still nothing.

But there were photos online. So many photos. And they looked like me. More so than any of Robert’s had, even though we’d thought Robert’s photos did look like me, at the time.

Plus, there was also so much information about how Ruari had disappeared.

“On honeymoon in Lombok,” I remember saying to Mia, “disappeared during the tsunami.”

And I remembered it—the crushing weight of the water. How dark it was. The pain in my lungs. And a woman. A woman calling my name.

But that was all I remembered.

We went to the police, me and Mia. And that just started it all off... this whole, well, it felt like an explosion. There were DNA tests done, and police from the UK and also Indonesia were involved. The DNA tests confirmed it. I was Ruari Braddon.

That was such a weird hour—finding out for sure. I felt like it was something to celebrate. Getting my life back. And yet I couldn’t celebrate it. Mia couldn’t either, because we read online that Ruari Braddon had been in Indonesia with his new wife, and we’d seen photos of her. Summer. It was such a gut-wrench seeing her name. It made Mia physically sick.

I looked at photos of her, mywife—photos of the two of us that had been published—but I didn’t recognize her. Or remember them being taken, those photos. But I wondered if I’d know her voice, when I heard it. If she was the woman in my nightmares who’d been calling my name for years.

It was such a weird feeling. A yearning, almost. I both wanted it to be her voice, and not. And of course, I was scared. Scared what all of this meant.

I said to Mia, “I’m still with you,” one day, because I could see she was worried. I think it was a couple days after the DNA confirmation. She was scared.

Doctors got involved too. Suddenly, everyone wanted to be doing tests on me, scans. And I meaneveryone. I had to undergo psychiatric evaluation too.

And then I heard that mywifewas flying over. This Summer Taylor-Braddon who I didn’t know. But maybe I did? And it was all so confusing.

I... I think a lot of people thought I did remember Summer though, at least partly, because I’d named mine and Mia’s daughter after her—that’s what they said. Rick got particularly mad at me one day about it. But he calmed down. Mia made him calm down. She held my hand and told me—and everyone—that we’d sort this. We’d work things out.

But I felt like a fraud. A criminal. Like I’d done something wrong. I couldn’t shake that feeling—and it’s still with me now. It’s like being haunted, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. It’s torture, it really is.

And I’ve got my little girl—Summer Hayden, that’s her name. But I’m not a Hayden. The real Robert Hayden is still officially missing, and I thought about him too much of the time, back then. Well I still do now, but then? Then it was driving me mad. And my little girl, I kept fixating on that, that she should be Summer Braddon, only that’s just messed up, because my wife and... I had a wife I didn’t remember, and a girlfriend who I was scared was going to leave me. This whole thing was just... It was a lot, you know.

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