I married an old man to save my sick father

I married a much older man to save my father.
One condition – every night before sleep I had to take a strange blue pill.

I didn’t know at the time that with every pill I was selling not my body, but my memory.

The Deal

I call it a deal because it wasn’t a wedding.
Weddings are for people who love each other. We sat across from each other in the lawyer’s office, as two business partners.

I – Clara, a 24-year-old translator from Pazardzhik, with shabby jeans, a cheap bag and a father in resuscitation.
He – Julian Turnev, 65-year-old owner of clinics, laboratories and whatever else you can imagine. A man with a face like old marble – beautiful, but with cracks in which she has layered so much grief that she could almost touch.

My father was dying. A rare nervous illness from which doctors only shrugged or asked for sums that sounded like phone numbers.

Julian was the only one who said:

We can cure him. But it won’t be cheap.

“Not cheap” meant more than anything I’ve ever seen in one piece. The sequel was brief:

I have a proposal. Marry me. All the costs of your father’s treatment are at my expense.

I remember my hands shaking over the table.

“Why me?” I was able to ask.

“Because I need a wife, not a mistress,” he replied calmly. “Someone who is by my side when things get… heavy.”

That’s when I thought it was a disease. His age, his visibly worn body, the slight forgetting in the conversation… Everything was screaming “Alzheimer’s” or something.

I was sitting in front of the blank sheet, and I knew that if I signed, I would get my father out of bed. If I don’t sign, I’ll bury him.

I signed.

The Mansion

Julian’s mansion was about an hour behind Sofia, deep in the mountains. Old, heavy, with wooden paneling and portraits of people looking as if they were about to get off the frames.

The first night he greeted me with a glass of champagne and a strangely calm smile.

“There’s one more little detail,” he said as he showed me around the rooms. “The house is old, the air is humid, full of spores, and God knows what.” You have to take a pill at night to feel good. Personally, I took it for years.

He pulled out a small glass bottle in which bluish tablets swam.

At nine in the evening. Always at nine.

Internally something shrank.

What are those pills?

Vitamins. A little nootropic. For memory. Nothing special.

This “nothing special” scared me the most.

But the next day my father was transferred to one of his clinics. The procedures have begun. I saw him get him out of bed, how he could hold the glass alone again.

And when at nine Julian put the pill in my palm and handed me a glass of water, I swallowed it.

The first nights

The first few nights, everything seemed like a stronger sedative.

The pill had a metallic taste, as if a mixture of sugar and rust. After ten minutes, the room slightly began to smudge along the edges. The lamp next to the bed glowed more yellow, the wallpaper was breathing, the shadows on the ceiling were reaching out.

After a few more minutes, I just… I was out.

Not like a normal dream. There were no dreams, there was no “I fall asleep, I wake up.”
There was “I’m here – I’m gone – I’m here again.”

In the morning I woke up with a terribly heavy head, and after a whole night of control in mathematics, which I do not remember a single task.

“You’ll get used to it,” Julian said as he saw I closed my eyes. “Your brain is working more than before.” That’s good.

I had made a deal with the devil. I had no right to complain, was I?

Side effects

After the first month, the real horror began.

I began to wake up with thoughts that were not mine.

I’m lying in bed, and the first thing that crosses my mind is:
“I have to check the lab results of yesterday, otherwise the neural bridge experiment will fail.”

Except I don’t work in a lab. I never am.

I go to the kitchen and take a breath on the way – and suddenly there is a smell of expensive French perfume in my nose. I can recognize the notes: jasmine, orange blood, musk. I’ve never worn one in my life.

Sometimes my hands curl up like they were playing the piano. I knew how the fingers were stacked, how to press a key, how the tree vibrated under the wrists. And I don’t have a single piano lesson.

It was more terrible.

When Julian took me to Sofia for examinations or meetings, strangers sometimes stopped me on the street.

“My God…” a woman with white hair and a refined scarf whispered once. Her eyes filled with tears. “That can’t be…”

“I’m sorry, do we know each other?” I asked.

“No… sorry…” he turned and almost ran away.

Such moments were becoming more and more. Strange glances, trembling lips, smiles that stop in the middle.

They looked at me like they were seeing a ghost.

Who’s Catherine?

One night, while I was fixing the library in his office, I dropped a book. It fell, the pages flew over the floor, and a photo burst from the inside.

On it – a woman around the forties, with her hair up, in a white laboratory apron. He holds a test tube in his hand, smiles slightly. Beautiful, intelligent face.

On the back – inscription: “Katerina. 1999.”

My stomach curled up like a fist.

I recognized the smile.
Because I saw her in the mirror every morning.

The same slightly raised corner of the lips. The same tiny wrinkle on the left when the smile is semi-ironic.

I’d seen her on the portraits on the walls, but I always thought I was suggesting.