OLYMPIA, Wash. — Jeff Ingram hunches over the countertop and peers at the foreign words in the Betty Crocker cookbook.
One-and-a-half cups of egg whites.
He should know this. He shoots a puzzled glance to his girlfriend.
"I haven't shown you yet how to separate an egg," she says as she cracks the egg and gently demonstrates how to toss the egg between the two shells to separate it.
Jeff is 40, and this, in a way, is his first angel food cake.
He used to bake so much that he had a special cake platter to display his creations. But now he moves about the kitchen a bit unsure of where the ingredients are kept.
He and his girlfriend, Penny Hansen, brush by each other. They exchange flirtatious smiles, like a couple in the first bloom of romance.
To Jeff, she is as new in his life as angel food cake. But Penny knew Jeff in another life — before he went missing and wound up on a downtown Denver street with no memory.
"Dissociative fugue," doctors called it, a rare form of amnesia caused by stress or trauma that can influence people to travel far away from their homes.
Jeff was found, but he had no idea who he was, much less who Penny was.
If they were going to stay together, they would have to get to know each other all over again. For Jeff, there was no past.
But what about the future?
Is it possible to find the same love twice in a lifetime?
Jeff Ingram and Penny Hansen were about to find out.
When Jeff and Penny met for the first time in 2005, the connection was instant. Jeff joked that he should just kiss Penny immediately and get it out of the way. They had talked on the phone every other night in the year since they connected on an Internet game site.