Messed up

Laila looked at Noah with anticipation. Waiting for him to respond to her grand news. But instead he looked at her in silence for the longest time. His piercing eyes staring right into her warm and gentle ones. Getting a bit nervous from the tension that was filling the air, Laila tried to fill the silence with one question after another in short intervals.

"Why aren't you saying anything?"

"Do you know who this backer is?"

"I was told he is someone that you acquired a lot of territory from since we moved. Anyone like that come to mind?"

When Laila asked this last question, this was when Noah suddenly began talking again. But while Laila expected an answer, she got a question from him instead.

In a serious tone Noah asked Laila, "Why would you ask the staff about your past with Olivia?" Laila was very surprised by Noah's question. Being caught completely off guard and not knowing what he meant by his question, Laila responded with, "Hmm? W-what do you mean?" Noah repeated his question without a single change in his tone. "Why would you ask the staff about your past with Olivia? I can understand you asking them about her past since they have lived and worked in this town longer than we have. But why would you ask them about YOUR past? Why ask them about the live you have lived?"

This was when Laila realized she had messed up. In her attempt of trying to tell Noah the truth about Olivia while keeping her own truth out of it, she had misspoken and gotten herself in a situation that would be hard for her to explain.

Laila's heart was pounding fiercely in her chest and her breath felt heavy. With each beat she felt the pound spread from her heart and move through her entire body. The pounding seemed to concentrate in her head, where she could barely hear anything other than that rhythmic sound. With her mind in overdrive, desperately trying to find an explanation, Laila could only stammer the word 'Well...' over and over again as the remaining words in her vocabulary were failing her.

Noah seemed to be losing his patience as he repeated his question once more. "Answer me Laila. Why did you need them to tell you about YOUR past? What is going on? You have been acting strange for the past two weeks or so. I couldn't put my finger on it and I kept dismissing it but I can't do that anymore. The looking at me like you have seen a ghost. The forgetting your password. The suddenly doubting Olivia and reaching out to Maria." Slowly impatience and anger made place for a sense of worry and feelings of hurt as he said, "You even went as far as avoiding sleeping with me. Or did you think I wouldn't notice or get hurt by it because I laughed it off? There are too many things for it to just be because of your pregnancy. Please just tell me. If you are having trouble I can help you. If something happened, whatever it is, just tell me and we will get through it together."

This was when Laila snapped back and stopped her self-doubting. If Noah had the courage to admit that, if had noticed so many of her failures but had chosen to turn a blind eye for her sake, if she had gotten a man that sweet so worried and hurt, then she needed to find her own courage and tell him the truth about herself as well. With a look of determination she faced Noah's saddened eyes and said, "You are right. There is something else that I have been hiding from you. I figured that if you hadn't noticed, why should I burst your reality but it seems I am left with no choice. The reason I need the staff to tell me about my past, the reason why I was acting strange and didn't know all those things I should know by being the Laila that you know and love, is because I am not that Laila and that isn't my past. At least not the past that I actually remember."

Noah's mind seemed to be blown by this information and now he had been turned into the stammering mess that Laila had been moments before, which to Laila was a good thing since it allowed her to tell her story without any interruptions.

"Though I am Laila, I am not the Laila that chose you all those years ago, that married you and got pregnant by you. I come from a timeline where I was married to Jake and had been with him for the past fifteen or so years. When it became clear that he hadn't changed his ways, I was somehow offered the chance to change a decision from my past in order to change my future. In my subconscious I chose to change my decision from ten years ago and picked you instead of him during our first date. Next thing I knew, I woke up in a new bed, in a new house, with a new husband and a new life I knew nothing about."

Finally Laila had told Noah her biggest secret. Now that all of it was out in the open she could no longer take any of it back and all that was left was for her to wait and see how Noah would respond to all of this, which would be a lot for any person to comprehend much less accept.