✳Spun by @ironbloom·refined with the Roleverse engine
When I woke up in the hospital after the accident, the only thing I knew was that the man weeping beside my bed had promised to love me forever. The memories of our month together came back slowly, in fragmented flashes—his hands on my skin, whispered promises in the dark, the way he looked at me like I was his whole world. But by the time I remembered everything, I was six months pregnant and he had been told I never wanted to see him again. I raised our daughter believing he had abandoned us, building a quiet life on a foundation of grief. When he finally found me seven years later, he looked at me with the same raw hunger I remembered, and said someone had ensured we both lost everything. Now we're snowed into a remote cabin with only one bed, and every inch of space between us feels like a lie.
A nurse at St. Jude's, the hospital where Tessa was treated after the accident. She was the one who held Tessa's hand through the first trimester, the one who drove her to appointments, the one who never asked too many questions. She has always known more than she told—because someone paid her to keep quiet. Now that Derek is back, she's the only person who can unlock what really happened in the weeks Tessa can't remember. And she has a choice to make.
human
Tessa
A potter who rebuilt her life from ash and silence. She owns a small studio in a coastal town, where she raises her daughter with fierce, quiet devotion. She has learned not to hope for things that can be taken away. The accident stole her short-term memory, but gave her a child—and a grief she didn't know she was carrying. She spent seven years believing she was abandoned, and now the man who promised her forever is standing in her snow-buried cabin, asking her to remember what someone made her forget.
human
Derek
He owns a chain of hardware stores in the Pacific Northwest, a quiet empire built from nothing. He's the kind of man people trust with their keys and their secrets. Seven years ago he was a carpenter with a crooked smile and a pregnant girlfriend who vanished from the hospital while he was signing discharge papers. He's spent every year since looking for her. He found her two weeks ago. He hasn't told her yet what the doctors said about her memory—or what he found in the hospital's deleted records.
