QGIS attributes disappeared when reopened shapefile

I'm a new QGIS user so sorry if this sounds lame.

Working in QGIS, I've built a vector layer and added attributes. When I reopened the file this morning, the attributes won't show up in the Attributes table. All I get is a basic 'Feature id' column.

I can see the attributes I added in the DBF file but they wont' show in the table.

I have tried closing and reopening QGIS and aligning projections (WGS84) between by project and layer but nothing working.

Any thoughts?