A bottle of vodka.
Jared, my neighbor.
A hammer banging on my hand.
Black trees rustling against a night sky.
A pit of despair.
“Oh fuck.” My skull is about to explode. Maybe my brain will leak out of my ears. Someone make this pain go away. “Hell.”
This time when Matt calls for the doctors, I don’t try to stop him.
I just hope they get here fast and with good drugs to shoot me up with until I can’t feel a thing.
Chapter Twelve
Hailey
Kaden is drugged to the gills with painkillers and fast asleep when I return to his hospital room.
Matt says he’s remembering things.
I wonder which ones, and if he remembered he doesn’t really love me. That I’m not really everything to him.
He seemed so sincere.
He probably was. Maybe I was important to him at first, and that’s all he remembers. Was I everything to him?
No, it can’t be true. I can’t have lost that without even realizing. Funny how it stings, a poison dart to the heart.
I sit beside him, staring at his face, tense even in sleep, a deep crease between his brows. Soon this game will be over. The lies will stop. He won’t think I still live here, that I have a key to his apartment, that we are together.
This brief interlude will finish and we’ll be back to where we were, only with more doubts and heartache.
This isn’t the miracle I asked for.
Maybe next time I should describe my wish in more detail.
Or maybe next time I shouldn’t wish for miracles at all, and accept what is instead of hoping for what ifs, for magical unicorns and miraculous fixes.
Like my mom always says, things don’t happen unless you make them happen.
Then again, she sees everything as a work project with a time plan and a complete SWOT analysis. Even my dad. Even me.
And she failed us both.
Kaden has been awake most of the day. He wants me to sit beside him on the bed, and holds my hand, so I don’t think he’s remembered yet anything regarding me.
Us.
He frowns a lot, but when I ask he tells me it’s the headache, and I believe him. The doctors said the headaches might take some time to ease up. He also won’t be able to do any work that entails great focus, like reading or working with tools.
At least his short time memory is getting better. Now he remembers why he’s in the hospital, why his family is here, what he ate in the morning.
He also remembers he doesn’t like hospitals.
“When are they letting me out?” he asks the nurse.