Married for three years, my wife Veronica Vargas still didn’t know me. She could remember the whole world, yet she couldn’t remember my face.
If I changed my hairstyle, she would ask, “Sir, who are you looking for?” If I wore different clothes, she thought I was a new security guard at home.
On our anniversary, I was trapped with her company’s employees in a collapsed mine. In the darkness, I felt my way to her side and told her I was Lincoln Perkins. But she pushed me away. “Stop pretending, my husband didn’t come.”
The rescue team dug for three days and nights before pulling me out alive. That evening, at the celebration banquet, Veronica lifted her glass. “Thanks to everyone, no casualties.”
She had forgotten I was still lying in the hospital.
From then on, I wore only one style of clothing, kept the same hairstyle, used the same cologne, everything so Veronica could recognize me.
Yet every time she looked at me, her eyes still carried that same emptiness, as if I were nothing more than a stranger.
I once thought it was punishment from the heavens. But the day I flew overseas to surprise her on her birthday, I saw her break through the crowd and throw herself into another man’s arms without a second thought.
So in the end, she couldn’t remember my face simply because I wasn’t the one she loved. If that was the truth, then I had no choice but to disappear into the sea of strangers.
——
Just as I turned to leave, several foreign police officers rushed in and surrounded me. They mistook me for a criminal. My clumsy French only made things worse, and before I knew it, they forced me down to my knees.
In shock and fear, I looked around and saw Veronica not too far away. Desperate, I shouted, “Veronica! Help me! They’ve got the wrong man!”
She turned her head at my voice. Her eyes moved across my face, but then, as if looking at someone she had never met, she looked away. “I don’t know him.”
That was the coldest thing I had ever heard.
Fifteen days passed. In a dark interrogation room and a freezing cell, I counted every bell toll just to survive each endless hour, until finally, a DNA test proved I was innocent.
Dragging my tired body out of the police station, the one waiting for me wasn’t Veronica but her secretary.
Giovanni Collins adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses, his voice filled with blame. “Mr. Perkins, what are you doing? Do you realize President Vargas waited at the airport for you for two whole hours?”
Whatever faint warmth I had left in my heart was completely frozen by the cold wind.
The day I returned home, as soon as I stepped out of the gate, I was surrounded by flashing lights and microphones. My time in jail overseas had already turned into a scandal known to everyone.
After I finally broke free from the crowd and walked into the house, the first thing Veronica said was not concern but reproach.
“How many times have I told you to wear a white coat when you go out? Why don’t you ever listen?”
She frowned, scolding me like a child. “You know I have face blindness. I can’t tell men’s faces apart.”
I clenched my hands.
She flipped another page of her document without even lifting her head, then gave a second order.
“The PR department already prepared the statement. Tomorrow we’ll hold a press conference.”
“You go explain and apologize to the public.”
Apologize? Who was I supposed to apologize to? For Veronica’s coldness and indifference, or for her excuse of face blindness?
I looked at her distant face and quietly asked, “At the airport, that man you hugged, who was he?”
Her hand that was turning the pages stopped, and for a moment, her face froze.
A few seconds later, she finally said, “There were too many people then, I thought that person was you.”
I almost laughed out of anger. That man was wearing a bright red leather jacket, with dreadlocks I had never once kept in my life.
