Free His Saving Grace by Sharon Cullen

down and faced him. He hated seeing the distrust in her expression, hated the distance between them. A distance he had created and didn’t know how to bridge.
    “The last battle was horrific,” he began. “A terrible mess. We never should have attacked that day, but that’s what our orders were. I don’t remember much. Just the orders to attack and then…” He shook his head. Forcing the memories didn’t help and only led to an aching head. Doctors had told him he would probably never remember the events leading up to his injury, so he’d stopped trying. Sometimes he thought that was for the best. “I don’t remember anything after that until I woke up in Tarik’s camp.”
    “You were wounded.”
    “Yes.”
    “Your leg?”
    He huffed out a laugh. “No. My leg wasn’t wounded at all. It was my head. I think…I know…” He drew in a deep breath. The moment had arrived, and he wasn’t prepared for it, no matter how many times he’d rehearsed it. “I damaged my brain, Grace.” He let the words fall between them, knowing they would change things forever. Hating himself. Hating his injury. Hating war. Hating everything at the moment. Every moment of every day, he wished this hadn’t happened to him. He wished he could go back to that day and do something different, anything that would have changed the course of his life, even if that act had ended his life.
    “When I woke up, Tarik told me I’d been unconscious for days. Neither of us know how many. Things were confusing. The battle was bloody, and Tarik had to go into hiding. He took care of me as best he could while also protecting himself. If he was caught by the English army with an English officer, he would have been killed. We were fighting the Russians and while Tarik is a Cossack and doesn’t claim himself as a Russian, his people do fight for Russia.”
    He picked up the digging implement and stared at it because it was much easier to stare at than Grace’s disbelieving blue eyes. “When I awoke, I was in excruciating pain. My head felt as if it had been…” He squeezed his eyes shut. The words escaped him, just as they always did. He had no idea what he had been about to say. Frantically searching for his thoughts didn’t help. The harder he tried, the more they escaped him.
    “Michael?”
    He opened his eyes to see her looking at him in concern. “I can’t remember things, Grace. The words sometimes won’t come to me. Like the color of your hair. I can’t remember what to call the color of your hair.”
    “Blonde?”
    Blonde. Her hair was blonde. Such a beautiful blonde, too.
    He could see the fear creeping into her eyes, the affirmation that he wasn’t the man she married and that she had no idea who this new man really was.
    He didn’t know who he was, either. It was strange, living in the same body he’d lived in for nearly thirty years and yet not knowing himself. Not only had he lost part of his memory, he’d also lost part of himself. The thing that made him Michael John Ashworth. That thing that made him uniquely him. It was so difficult for him to describe and comprehend and nearly impossible to make Grace understand. All he knew was that prior to the battle, he was the same person he’d been for nearly twenty-eight years, and after the battle, he was not that person anymore. And no matter how hard he tried, he would never find that person again.
    Now he had to convince Grace to accept this new person. He would never expect her to fall in love with him. That was too much to ask, for he did not even like himself. How could he ask her to love him?
    “Yesterday at breakfast I couldn’t remember what a fork was called, but I can vividly remember the day I cut my wrist.” He lifted up his hand to display the scar that had convinced her he was truly her husband. “I remember exactly what we were talking about and the way the sun shone off your yellow hair as you scaled that fence. But some things escape me. Have you ever