Chapter 2

When I woke, the whole room smelled of disinfectant.

My mother was slumped over the edge of the bed. Her hair had gone much whiter.

The moment I said "Mom," she jerked awake.

She grabbed me and held on, her shoulders shaking with sobs.

"Viola, you're finally awake."

I tried to lift a hand to pat her, but my right arm wouldn't move.

The pain dragged from my shoulder up to the back of my skull, and I couldn't hold in a gasp.

The door banged open.

A man rushed in.

He was terribly thin, his shirt crushed into wrinkles, his jaw dark with stubble.

When he saw my eyes open, he froze in the doorway.

The next second he came toward me, eyes red.

"Viola."

"I'm here. I'm back."

He reached out to hold me.

I flinched back on instinct, and the monitor shrieked at once.

"Who are you?"

The man's hand stopped in midair.

My mother's crying stopped too.

He stared at me for a long moment, then forced a corner of his mouth up.

"Don't play around."

"You've been out for twelve days. The doctor said you might be a little confused when you woke up."

He took another step forward.

"I'm Stan James."

The name left nothing behind in my head.

I looked at my mother.

"Mom, why is he here?"

The color drained slowly from Stan James's face.

The doctor arrived quickly.

He asked me a dozen or so questions.

I knew my own name, my ID number, my home address.

I remembered the year my father died, the year my mother closed the cassette-tape repair shop.

I remembered my college classmates, the equipment at the sound restoration center, even the three case file numbers I'd taken on before the accident.

The doctor pointed at Stan James.

"And him?"

I looked at him carefully for a while.

"I don't know him."

Stan James suddenly turned and drove his fist hard into the wall.

The doctor asked him to step out.

The tests took the whole day.

Right temporal-lobe contusion, retrograde amnesia, and a strong trauma response.

The doctor said memory isn't filed away by person, and my case wasn't common.

"She hasn't deleted one particular person from her mind."

"It's more likely that every memory connected to this one person has been blocked off by the trauma."

Stan James asked through the door.

"When will it come back?"

The doctor gave no definite answer.

"Maybe a few days. Maybe many years. Maybe never."

That night, Stan James brought a marriage certificate.

In the photo I was leaning against him, smiling, happy.

The official seal was real.