Page 69 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
“When was that?”
“After we got engaged. When you met them, I think you were completely bemused to find yourself in such a domestic situation.”
“Why?” I ask the question with a burning sense of frustration inside me.
“You didn’t have a good childhood.”
“You said you didn’t know anything about me.”
She looks the other way. “Right before I left you, you told me that you saw your father die. And you also told me… You said that you found your mother’s body in the kitchen when you were a child. And that you’re certain your father had killed her. When I took you to meet my parents I didn’t know any of that. In hindsight I can understand why my life confounded you.”
I sit with that information and I try to assemble it into something I recognize. But I can’t picture myself as a boy, much less imagine my parents. What sort of house did we live in? Was it in Romania? In the country or the city? Did I love my mother?
Did I love my father?
I can’t see anything but Cassandra. She is every memory, and suddenly more than just the one. I see her in the yellow dress, I see her in the black and I feel a great sense of achievement and satisfaction as I cross the room and take a tray of champagne out of her hands.
I see her on the couch, I wrap my hand around her throat and my body responds to this image. I remember her painting then.
“We liked it rough, didn’t we?”
She nearly chokes on a laugh. “We did. It’s the one place we always agreed and everyone was happy.”
Why did I fail her so profoundly emotionally then? Why was I such a bad husband to her?
“What?” she asks, sounding irritated.
“I’m thinking,” I say.
I can’t be in the dark about who I am. It’s an issue of safety, first and foremost for Cassandra. But I also feel compelled to look at the records of who I was as a man, so that I can fashion myself into a different one. One who can be with her. One who can have her.
Love her.
“I love you,” I say, because it is the only truth I know and right then it’s brighter than any image in my head. Right then, it is the only thing I know for sure.
She goes white, the color draining from her cheeks, her whole body going rigid. “You don’t.”
“I do. I woke up knowing nothing but your face. It’s the only memory I have now. I see it, the night we met at the gala. I went straight to you. I knew I wanted you and no one else. I knew I had to have you.” I don’t remember the words I was thinking, or what my plan was. What I’m experiencing is the echo of the feeling.
The certainty that I needed her more than anything or anyone. That I would give up my life for her if it was required.
But you didn’t. If you had done that she wouldn’t have left you.
True. It was true. And yet, I’d had my life stripped from me. My memory of who I was. She is all that remains and I will not make the same mistake again.
I won’t lose her to hold onto something that I can live without. I’ve been given a gift, I think. Everything unnecessary was taken from me. Cassandra is what remains.
I was clearly a foolish man who thought that other things mattered more than my wife, but I cannot argue with this thing fate has given both of us.
“Let’s walk through the reality of the situation,” she says, her voice caustic. “I told you I loved you and that I needed more from you and you wouldn’t give it. No, I don’t think you believed I’d leave you but that’s because I was such a sucker for you and you were so egotistical it never occurred to you that someone would defy you in that way.”
“I can’t know that, so what you’re doing is writing a one-sided narrative that I have no ability to rebut.”
“Well, Dragos, you didn’t do anything to fight that narrative when you knew the truth either. You let me sit with my own presuppositions and you did nothing to tell me about you, who you were, what you felt. And then you followed me to Paris.”
“Because I needed you.”
“Or because you lost, and you hate to lose.”
