The Life You Don't Remember

May tossed the paper examination gown in the garbage and threw on her dirty uniform as fast as she could, wincing as the button of her pants pressed into her bruised abdomen. She unfastened the clasp and probed the bump in her middle delicately.

“You’re still here,” she murmured. “It’s going to be okay. I’ll do better. I promise.”

She sank down into a chair that had been propped against the wall and put her head in her hands.

May could not remember the last time she felt like such a spectacular failure.

She had botched the mission. The Superior was dead because she could not hold it together. She should not have even been in the field in the first place. She almost lost her child because she could never say “no” to Coulson when he said he needed her watching his six.

Coulson.

What the hell was she going to say to him?

He deserved some kind of explanation for her colossal fuck-up. There was nothing she could tell him that was going to make her actions make sense.

May was still bent over in the chair, trying to convince herself to get up, when someone knocked on the door.

“Come in,” she said, sitting up straight.

“Hey,” Coulson greeted her softly.

In the time it took for him to turn around to close the door, May had her game-face back on.

“Sorry it took so long,” she said. “I’m just waiting for the release papers, then they’ll let me go. How’s Daisy?”

Coulson blinked.

“Oh, um, she’s fine,” he stuttered. “Anxious to get out of here, but the doctors want her to stay the night.”

May nodded. She got to her feet and walked to the exam table to grab her jacket.

“The nurse said you, uh, you checked out okay,” Coulson said.

“Yeah,” she agreed, her back to him. “Just a broken finger and some bruising.”

“She said your baby was fine too.”

May’s heart stopped for a second, then seemed to beat twice as fast to make up for the interruption. She took her time pulling on her jacket.

“I guess doctor-patient confidentiality doesn’t extend to R.N.’s,” she muttered.

“There was a misunderstanding,” Coulson said. “I said I was your partner and she thought I was…”

May turned around and met his eyes, silently daring him to continue.

“But she’s not wrong, is she?” He asked.

This is not how May wanted him to find out. True, she had yet to determine when and what she was going to say to him, but it would not have been like this. Not from a stranger in a hospital after she had just been attacked.

To her credit, May did not waver or hesitate. Bad timing aside, she had nothing to be ashamed of.

“No,” she replied evenly. “She’s not wrong.”

She watched as the color drained from his complexion at her confirmation.

“Daisy said we were married in the Framework.”

He spoke so quietly, May could barely make out the words. She did not know if she was even meant to hear them, or if he was just thinking out loud, trying to make himself believe what he already knew to be true.

“This is—this is why you froze that day in the warehouse, wasn’t it?” He realized. “You weren’t afraid for yourself. You were afraid for the baby.”

May nodded imperceptibly, feeling the heat rise to her face.

“May,” he exhaled. “What the hell were you thinking, going into the field today?”

“I was thinking you needed me to watch your ass,” she shot back. “And I was right.”

“You should have told me,” he said.

He probably did not mean it as an admonition. May could only guess what he had been imagining since he found out the truth. But she did not care.

The weight of this secret had been pressing against her for weeks. Not a day had passed that she did not question if she was doing the right thing by keeping it to herself. She had her reasons. She could deal with the hounding of her own conscience, but could not take it from him.

“No, I shouldn’t have,” she replied.

“I could have helped you!”

“How?” she demanded. “You were so damn preoccupied with trying to come to terms with the fact that I am the person I used to be, how could you have possibly understood, let alone helped me?”

There was nothing he could say to that. It was true.

“Did you ever stop to ask yourself what I lost?” She asked. “I am Melinda May. I am every single part that makes me who I am. I have every memory from both lives. You are the one who forgot.”

The silence that hung between them was as loud as a gunshot.

Coulson nodded and stared at the floor.

In her mind’s eye, he looked every bit the man he had when they stood in their kitchen in the Framework, trying to convince her of a truth she was afraid to admit.

She had hurt him and it was not fair. It was not his fault that he did not know what she had been through. It was not his fault that he did not remember.

But she was still angry.

“Then, please, help me remember,” he said.

May smiled sadly and leaned against the exam table.

“I can’t, Phil,” she answered. “I have ten years’ worth of memories that happened between us. I could tell you things that happened, things we said or did, but nothing I say is going to make you remember how it felt.”

May crossed her arms and shook her head at herself, avoiding the grief in his eyes.

“I thought this was all a selfish impulse,” May sighed.

“What was?” He asked.

“This,” she replied, gesturing to her stomach. “Wanting to have a baby. I would have never believed that I could have brought a child into the world if it wasn’t for you. But you convinced me that it was okay, and I wanted to believe you were right.

“That’s why I didn’t tell you, Phil. Because the person who would do that for me, just to make me happy? He’s gone.”

Coulson shook his head and crossed space between them. He brought his hand to rest on her arm.

“I’m not gone, May,” he said firmly. “I don’t remember this happening, but that doesn’t mean I’m not happy that it did.”

He gave her arm a tight squeeze. Everything inside her that told her to stand her ground was not enough to stop her from leaning into his touch.

“The Framework didn’t make us who we are,” he continued. “There was nothing in that place that we did not bring in ourselves. It was a product of our thoughts and feelings.

“So you have to know whatever world we are in, you are everything to me. I need you to know that.”

May’s lips parted in disbelief. She searched his face for any indication that he knew that he had said these words before, but there was nothing.

It was just his truth, as real now as it was in the place that he could not remember.

“I might not be the person you knew in the Framework,” he continued. “But I can make you happy here.”

“Both of you,” he added, glancing at her abdomen.

She closed her eyes and exhaled.

“Please, May,” he implored. “Please let me try.”

Taking a blind step forward, she rested her head on his chest, settling in the spot where she used to fit right under his chin. He embraced her carefully, as if one wrong move when send her running from the room. When she wrapped her arms around him, he abandoned caution and pulled her against him so tightly she could barely breathe.

She did not care.

Everything about him was just as she remembered: the weight of his arms, the steady beat of his heart, the warmth of his touch.

As cliché as it sounded, he felt like home.

She mumbled something that was muffled by the fabric of his shirt.

“What was that?” He asked, pulling away in inch.

“We met in Boston in the middle of a blizzard,” she said.

Coulson smiled.

That day that Daisy had come to their house and told them the truth about their lives, May knew she could never go back. She thought that whatever happened from that point on, she would be stuck between two universes.

Maybe she had not given herself, or Phil, enough credit.

Even though she had the memories of two lives in her head, she was not irretrievably doomed to be trapped in a prison between them. Just because she could not go back, did not mean she could not move forward. She just needed to find the strength to try.

“Lola was buried under four feet of snow and I gave you a ride home,” she said, pulling back further to look at him.

“That’s very chivalrous of you,” Coulson remarked. “So, I had Lola, huh? Was I a spy there as well?”

May’s mouth twitched.

“No, you were a teacher.”

“Yeah? What did I teach?”

He opened the door of the exam room and they walked out together, hand-in-hand, her fingers locked between his.

May paused.

“What is it?” He asked.

“That’s strange,” May answered. “I don’t remember.”