Page 70 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
I reject that. Wholly. “Or because I couldn’t live without you.”
“Do you know what I think? I think you’re desperate for this to be true because for some reason I’m the only thing you have to hold onto. And maybe, for some reason, this version of yourself wants to believe you contain some sort of basic human decency or a modicum of emotion, but let me tell you something, Dragos, when you remember everything, you don’t care about that. You don’t care about being a good man. A good husband.”
She shakes her head. “I can’t do this. I can’t.” Then she leaves me standing there in the room with nothing but the shattered vase.
I don’t know the layout of my own house. I don’t know where to go or what to do but I find myself walking through the house as if some GPS coordinates were entered into my body without me knowing it. I arrive at a door and I expect to open it and find a bedroom, but when I push it open that’s not what I find.
Don’t you ever get tired of black?
I recall that as I step inside and look at another severe room, totally absent any color.
I walk to the desk, a large, horseshoe shape with columns of drawers, and I sit in the plush leather chair positioned there.
The computer sees my face and wakes up. I sit there, staring at the screen, and then my left hand goes to the third drawer from the top just beside me. I open it, and inside there’s a key.
I sit there staring at it. I know something then, even though I’m not sure how. It’s muscle memory that guided me to the key, and that sees my hand picking it up now.
I don’t keep anything important on computers. Anything can be hacked. I know that with a certainty that defies logic.
There is a door at the back of the room and it has a keyhole in the doorknob. I stick the key in and it fits. But the key doesn’t unlock the door; rather it ignites a light up at the top that shines into my eye, and only then does the door give.
I open the door, and behind it is a keypad. I don’t think. I simply enter numbers that mean nothing to me but that follow a pattern my hands seem to know, and then another door gives.
And behind that door is a room filled with files.
I feel a deep sense of foreboding as I walk inside. And I’m not certain why. Something Cassandra said echoes inside me. I didn’t care then if I was a good man.
Why do I care now?
I have been dropped into a life, some thirty years into living it, with no knowledge of good or evil. She is my compass. And the arrow pointing to her is demanding that I be someone worthy of her, and I know…
Deep down I fear I’m not.
And that the proof of that may lie here.
The file cabinets pertain to business, I’m certain of that. But there is a box in the corner that isn’t the same. Not a neat file cabinet, but a box that looks like it came from a moving truck.
I make my way to it, and I pick it up. It’s heavy.
I need to go through all of these things. I need to try and piece myself together. But I decide that I need to do it with Cassandra.
Because I knew what sort of man I was when I first met her, and I saw a reason to hide it.
My instinct now is to continue to hide except…
I already know how that film ends. I don’t like that ending. It ends with her leaving. It ends with me chasing her to Paris and her doing mad paintings in her garret, missing me and hating me all at once.
Even without the bullet and the head wound, this isn’t the ending I want.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
I think she said that to me once. I hear it in her voice.
I might be insane, that’s the trouble. I don’t know. But I am capable of making a choice right now, and with that agency I’m determined to not simply walk in these same footsteps I walked in before.
I carry the box out of the office and I try and trust my feet to carry me to where I think she might be, but this time I do find a bedroom and she isn’t in it. It’s clearly mine, but there is a door inside, and when I open it, it takes me to another bedroom.
“Cassandra?”
