He looks like himself, she thinks. Save for the bruises and the stitches and the bandages. He looks like himself.

Himself, of course, being the man who only a few moons ago unceremoniously proposed forever by her side. Her head snug against the crook of his neck, his arms forged around her like he longs to mold them into one. You know we're gonna be together forever, right?

She brushed it off then, easily slid back into their well practiced banter. A question will be asked when the moment finally calls for it, she'd probably be reduced to tears, and it'll be the bravest feat he'll have ever taken. An end to a long and winding road that only ever had one destination.

She'd give anything now to go back at that late hour and drag him to the nearest ordained minister.

Harvey Specter moved through the world with a spotless armor in the shape of a ten thousand dollar tailored suit. His unnervingly charismatic demeanor is only made all the more irresistible by his suave single liners and dangerous smile. He's the face of a well accomplished New Yorker bachelor that can get anything he wants. And he knew it.

But her Harvey. Her Harvey was gentle. All his sharp edges, soft and molten in her company. With her, he was open and more vulnerable. His competitive streak only second to his need to ensure her safety and happiness. In her hands, he's putty and moonstruck, craving her closeness more with each passing day. Sulking and moody when she gets too far, needy and hopelessly in love every time he finally has her back in his arms.

Except everything that makes himherHarvey has been excised.

Retrograde amnesia, his doctor announced. Followed by a watered down explanation about traumatic head injuries typically from accidents that is quickly lost on her as she latches on the word amnesia. A thing of the movies. Or books. A depraved motif in a harrowing romantic novel, not a parasite that's taken over her reality.

She feels an arm wrap around her shoulder, squeezing her tight as an act of solidarity while the doctor continues to yammer away. Marcus promises he'll be here to help with anything she needs, anything that they need to get through this.

She feels the sincerity in his voice and she hopes he can feel her gratitude when the words are trapped in her mouth. He nods and pulls her in a hug. He claims his brother loves her too much never to return to her. She thinks he's scared and making promises he has no way of delivering.

She thinks Marcus is her brother now too, extending a pond of hope afraid hers is running dry.

Harvey requests to talk to him alone and of course she easily obliges. Marcus catches her eyes before she leaves the room, the lines on the corner of his offering an apology, those by his mouth holding out something resembling reassurance.

She thinks she knows better; she thinks it's pity.

Her feet carry her to nowhere in particular, the restlessness nestling inside her needing to expended. She strolls aimlessly in the hospital as her mind struggles to make sense of its new discovery.

He looked through her. A grim accomplishment never thought possible until now. Three meager words felt like a knife driven straight to her chest. Stabbing her again and again and again, twisting the knife deeper each time.

"Who are you?"

She thinks she's drowning, choking on her own blood.

She opened her mouth to respond, but her voice was caught in her throat. The air too thick to breathe, too heavy to speak through. She searched for the right word. Girlfriend felt too small, too childish, too immature. Too inadequate. Partner too professional, too detached. Fiancée a step too early. To-be she considers adding.

The love of your life.

The most honest truth. The title bestowed upon her by everyone around them long before either of them were ready to face its depth.

The silence between them stretched to a degree too unbearable. She's suffocating and he's not there to pull her out of the water.

"Donna."

Like it's all he needs to know. Because there was a time, when his life first weaved into hers, where her name was all it took to entangle their fates to a point of no return.

Rachel calls her for the nth time that week. She finds a bench and finally allows her legs to give, the dam holding back her tears finally breaking. She tries to break the news to her. He's forgotten me. And you. And Mike. And god knows who else he and I considered family. But her sobs are turning her words into a jumble of breathless gasps. Rachel urges her to breathe and to focus on calming down. Tells her she's listening and waiting patiently for when she's collected herself and is ready to speak again.

She's acutely aware of the worry she's causing her best friend, but her grief has kicked in. Sweeping her in an unforgiving riptide, dragging her away to sea.

When she did trudge her way back to shore, having regained some control, Rachel's response came with a careful, controlled tone, and yet with a shock still palpable.

Rachel says she's sorry. Says it more than she can count and she wants to ask why. Wants to tell her nothing about this warrants an apology from neither she nor Mike. Rachel tells her she and Mike are coming back to visit as soon as possible. She wants to decline their proposition, wants to dispel their anxieties. Lie and say she's fine and they're Donna and Harvey, there's nothing they can't beat, retrograde amnesia be damned.

Except she's scared shitless too.

And if she's being honest with herself, she's worried she can't be left alone with the shell of the man she loves and not crumble to a million fragments.

She hears his room number echo from the speakers and she runs before any of the words even sink in. A group of nurses rally around him and she thinks she might die. She spots Marcus in the corner of her eye biting his fist, eyes stricken with tears. Looking just as helpless as she imagines she does.

She finds out later they had to sedate him after learning about Gordon and Lily.

She takes him home a week after


Equipped with a long list of instructions from his doctors and a baggage full of uncertainty, they cross the threshold of an apartment haunted by the many versions of them it's bore witness to.

She gives him a tour of the penthouse he chose and he follows her with cautious curiosity, as if being given access into someone else's life. She shows him the living room where she once told him she's coming back to him, the kitchen where he'd try to hide an I love you behind their shared morning coffee, the bedroom where they reminded each other of their love in ways words couldn't.

They said it might last a few days to a couple weeks. Maybe months. Not to lose hope because his memories can return at any moment, but also to prepare for the ugly possibility that it never does.

The pit in her stomach grows deeper and she wonders if she'll ever feel normal again.

His doctors advised that, barring work, they try to return to his normal routine as much as possible. On their first day back, she gives him a carefully curated list she drew up one night while he slept quietly next to her in the hospital. A list of places and activities meticulously characterized by length, difficulty, and her own annotations on the side. Things she thought would help him reacquaint to his most recent lifestyle.

He appreciates it, he says. She tells him it's nothing.

And it really is. I'd go through the ends of the earth, for you. She wants to say. Find sunken ships and prehistoric islands if that's what it would take to find you. Easily give up any chance of paradise if it meant being by your side. And you would do the same.

My Harvey would have done the same.

He tells her he doesn't think he's ready to see people, not right away anyway. He thinks it's too much to bear too soon. She reassures him they'll do everything at his pace.

He looks so grateful and she doesn't know why it breaks something inside her.

They start small. She asks him if he wants coffee and he heartily agrees. Black with a splash of vanilla. I don't take vanilla with my coffee. She doesn't mind him as he takes a sip anyway.

She gets to watch it astonish him once again. His eyes beaming like a cup of joe just changed the trajectory of his life. She thinks the feelings brewing inside her are not far from what she's just "introduced" to him. The sweet veil of witnessing him learn to trust her masking the bitter reason behind why he even has to repeat the process.

She gives him a new phone as his old one was pretty much destroyed from the crash. She explains she had it restored from his iCloud so it should be identical to his previous one. Then she tries to explain what the cloud is, hell if she even knew.

He makes a joke.

"If only we could do the same to me."

She can't bring herself to laugh. She bites her lip, trying to stop it from quivering.

If only.

The rest of the day flows seamlessly; she takes him to the park and they walk quietly side by side. She thinks they both appreciate the comfortable silence, both needing a break from the expected familiarity that hangs between them. She gets them hotdogs from that one cart she knew he frequented and they eat it on a bench overlooking the lake.

It's a good start.

Well, it was a good start. Until night time fell and a cold and awkward gap stretched between them, freezing both of them on either side of the bed. She remembers when the idea of personal space was something he never afforded her, hogging her to himself every chance he got. It feels like a lifetime ago now.

She thinks perhaps there were lines she needed to draw to also save herself.

The next day she tells him maybe it's best she stay in the guest room for a while and he nods in agreement, telling her she should do whatever makes her comfortable. She wants to grab him by his shoulders and jolt him awake, slap his face and bring him back to her. Tell him that her comfort is in his arms and not alone in an empty bed.

Instead, she tells him to sit on the couch so she can change his dressings.

She goes with him to his checkups. Goes with him to get his stitches removed. Goes with him when he finally gets the green light for more strenuous exercise. Goes with him to make sure she catches all the details his doctor spews that he might miss. Sometimes, most times, she catches herself staring at him.

Like she's unknowingly memorizing him, because a part of her, the rather irrational one, is petrified she'll lose her memory too.

And she, unreasonably, clings to a sickening hypothetical question: what happens when they're both stuck at different points of their lives with neither to help right the other's course?

What happens then?

He spends his noons with Marcus giving her some time to check in at work. She still can't get herself to spend too much time at the office and even then he occupies most of her thoughts. Everyone understands of course. Take all the time you need.

They share dinners together most nights. Every night once Marcus inevitably had to go back to his life in Boston.

It's not all bad. She tries to remind herself of that. Chanting it in her head like a mantra. It's not like he's pushing her away. On the contrary, actually. He asks her questions. About him, his life, theirs. He shows her pictures or videos he dug up on his phone, requesting context. When she can, and sometimes even when she can't, she provides him an answer so vivid it's almost palpable. Putting her acting prowess to its most important test as she does her best to jog his memory.

She'll ask him, anything? and most nights he'll shake his head no. Sometimes he'd say kinda or a bit, yeah or another vague variation. She wishes she could convince herself he isn't lying. Sometimes she tells him for a lawyer, you're a pretty bad liar.

He'll laugh and there's both a twinkle and a tiredness in his eyes that she doesn't know what to do with. He'd respondto no one but you, it seems. Dinners are mostly easy but she knows behind the lightness of their conversation he's confused and hurting. And she fears that he feels guilt for never filling in the blanks of the stories she shares.

His laughter would fade and he'd hold her gaze, like he's sobering up. Like a fog is clearing.

Every time he'd say, you really do know me.

And her head would nod, as if on cue, yeah, I really do.

When she doesn't bring home take outs, she books reservations to their favorite restaurants. They go to Del Posto and some nights she can convince herself they're back on their weekly dinner date and not stuck on a highlight reel of the last thirteen years. He tries to get to know her, asking her question after question about where she grew up, where she went to school, what she does, how they met.

He asks her how long they've been together. She thinks the right answer should be thirteen years, but she doesn't know how to condense that whole fiasco that was not without murderers and therapists and interior designers that bothered them but "didn't" mean anything. So she tells him the short answer and she thinks he's wondering if they were as serious as everyone makes them up to be.

She tells him about Del Posto and their anniversary dinners. Tells him about that one time they went after a disastrous fight that ended with her working at someone else's desk. He asks her how that happened and she says she doesn't have it in her to explain that just yet.

"I bet I was an ass," he extends an olive branch.

It's true but it caught her off guard anyway, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips before she could stop it. "You have no idea." It forces a light, almost giggle out of her and she couldn't help but feel a little lighter.

She's forgotten how big a flirt he was. Still is but, he teases her with the same boyish playfulness he did when they were working at the DA's office. She flirts back because it's a language they were more than just fluent in. Because flirting is a dance that comes as second nature to them.

She thinks she catches glimpses of the Harvey she first met. Only to realize, the man in her memory is closer in age with the Harvey he remembers, than the one who promised the rest of his days by her side.

She'd catch an opening in their conversation to take a bite from her meal and she'd feel his eyes boring into her.

"What?"

"You're really beautiful."

Her stomach swarms with butterflies. Then someone more pessimistic at the back of her mind clips their wings and mourns the fact that the depth of her love for him drowns his easy flirting.

But it's not all bad. She tries to remind herself of that. She needs to accept their progress day by day because it's not nothing. They're both trying and they both deserve to relish every moment when it's not all bad. Because they are not without days where it feels like the tide turned right from under her in her sleep. Days where he keeps to himself, only songs from his record player filling the silence that echoes in their home.

She asks if there are any doubts she can clear and sometimes he seeks her help. She asks him what he remembers and he'll tell stories ranging from peeks into his mundane everyday life in college to accounts from his childhood in Boston. He'd ask her if he's ever told her that and the "bigger" ones, sure. Those Harvey felt significant enough to share with his most trusted confidant.

The rest feel like he's spun the table round and she's getting to know him too.

There are times he merely shakes his head. He tells her it's a particularly noisy day. His head feels like it's pulling threads from every direction but he doesn't know how to weave any of it into a singular cloth. He'd excuse himself, go on a walk around the block. Giving her his word that he won't take long, just needing some air and some time to himself. She'd say sure and he promises to pass by the bakery down the street to bring her back some of those strawberry and custard mille-feuilletheylove. If it's later during the day he'll come back with their usual from that shitty Thai place she loves and he'll help her set the table. They'll move around the kitchen with an ease she thinks can only come from thirteen years of circling a shared orbit. His hand would linger on the small of her back and her world slows.

The smell of coffee usually is first to infiltrate her mornings. She'd use the shower in his room and the sound will rouse him from his sleep. She'd step out in her robe to see him in the kitchen preparing breakfast, she'd ask if she woke him again and he'd assure her it's no bother.

She goes to her room, puts on the dress she picked out the night before and does her make up. He's ready with a hot mug in hand as soon as she makes her way back to him and he greets her good morning. She takes a seat next to him and they eat whatever he's whipped up.

One day, the hot cup of coffee comes with more than justgood morning.He informs her that he's meeting with a friend from law school, she asks who, and he lays her a doozy.

"Scottie," his mouth moves and she imagines one way she knew could shut him up. "Dana Scott, I think I mentioned her."

"You haven't," She says too quickly. "But I know her. Scottie." Something burns. "Yeah, sure. Of course." Maybe it's the fresh brew wrapped around her palms, maybe its her cheeks. She takes one sip before settling it down on the counter with an all too careful cautiousness like she's scared it'll tumble from the trembling of her hands she's struggling to hide.

He looks at her with a crinkle between his brows, "Aren't you going to eat?"

She avoids his overly attentive gaze, "Um, no. I have an early meeting today. You have Ray's number, let him know when you want to leave."

And then she was out the door.

The ding of the elevator alerts her she's reached the 50th floor and she practically runs for the restroom, missing the look of concern on the associate she ran past. Her hand shot out, reaching for the closest stall long before the rest of her body could catch up. The world around her violently spins and a part of her wishes it would just swallow her whole.

She hurls nothing but acid. Putrid and gnawing. She's hyperventilating and she knows it's a panic attack.

She lets it pass, composes herself, then deals with the whirlwind of emotions wrecking her insides the best way she currently knew.

She buries herself with work.