I turned and found her back in her wheelchair, watching me from just inside the foyer.
“I suppose you have questions,” I said, as I slowly closed the door.
“And I’m hoping you have answers.”
I inclined my head slightly. “I hope so, too.”
I gestured for her to go back into the living room. She was getting around quite well in the wheelchair. Independent as ever, she wouldn’t let me help her much. That was a side of Harley to which I was very well accustomed. I followed her, wondering how much longer it would be before she was walking out the door, especially after physical therapy started.
“Where do you want to start?” I asked, as I slowly lowered myself to the couch.
Harley didn’t answer right away. She’d rolled herself to the back of the room and was staring out at the backyard. She’d always liked the view. I remembered when I first brought her to my house, she made a beeline for that back door and stood out on the patio, studying the lines of the garden and the pool as if she’d never seen a suburban backyard before. She didn’t even want to see the rest of the house. It was the artist in her, always looking for the perfect lines, the perfect vision. It was the first thing I fell in love with when I fell in love with her.
“Do you want to go outside?”
“Why did you lie to me?”
There was the question. It was the same thing she asked me three months ago.
“Why would you lie to me? Don’t you know what that does to me, to know that the one person who should have been most honest with me was the one who told me the biggest lie?”
I dragged my fingers through my hair. “It wasn’t exactly a lie.”
“You told me you were my fiancé, but we apparently called off the wedding months ago.”
That lies.
“Because you didn’t know who I was when you woke up. I didn’t think a long explanation about our relationship was really in order at the time.”
“But it’s been over a week. Don’t you think the time has arrived?”
I nodded slowly, as my mind moved over the time we’d spent together this past week. If we weren’t discussing the things she wanted to know, we were going to doctor appointments and discussing her recovery. There wasn’t exactly a lot of time to explain the intricacies of our relationship.
“You had the card I gave you that named me as your next of kin when the car hit you. You obviously wanted me there, wanted me to make decisions for you; otherwise, you would have taken it out of your fanny pack.”
She nodded. That clearly made sense to her even though I knew Harley. She likely left it there because she was too lazy to put forth the effort it would take to remember it existed, let alone replace it. The fact that the card still existed in her fanny pack didn’t mean anything—no matter how badly I wanted it to.
“When did we call off the wedding?”
Again I dragged my fingers through my hair. “Almost four months ago.”
Three months, three weeks, and four days to be exact.
“Why?”
And there was the rub. I still wasn’t quite sure. I knew she was angry with me, but I didn’t think what I’d done was bad enough for her to call off the wedding. But she did. And that was all that mattered, right?
“It was a week before the wedding. We went to the county courthouse to get our marriage license, and there was a snafu with the paperwork.”
Harley maneuvered her wheelchair so that she could face me. Her eyes were searching my face, looking for the truth in my words. I used to joke with her, tell her that her eyes were a natural lie detector. She thought I was joking, but it wasn’t as much a joke as an expression of fear. I could never lie to her, and that scared the crap out of me.
“What kind of snafu?”
I looked down at my hands where they were clutched between my legs. Funny how something that had seemed so inconsequential for so long was suddenly the most important thing in my life.
“I was married before. Years and years ago. And, for some reason, the divorce wasn’t coming up on their database when we went in for the marriage license. They wouldn’t issue it until we produced the original divorce decree.”
“But you were divorced?”
“Long before I ever met you, Harley.”
A small frown marred her beautiful face, threatening to break my heart. I wanted to touch her, but I was afraid that after everything that had happened today, she wouldn’t appreciate it very much.
“Why would that upset me so much?”
“Because we’d never talked about it. Because of what Philip had done to you.”
She nodded slowly, as she ran her hands over the top of her cast. I knew she was still having a significant amount of pain in her leg, and I also knew it was time for her pain meds. I could see the pain in her eyes; I could see her wrestling with her need to know what she’d forgotten and her need to deal with her physical health. I was hoping health would win out, but then she looked at me and I could see that it wouldn’t.
“I still don’t understand,” she said, that frown still dancing over her face. “I remember you proposing. I remember how happy I was. Why would your past be such an issue?”
“Let me take you to your room, give you your pills. We can talk about this later.”
She shook her head. “I want to talk about it now.”
“Harley, you’re clearly in pain—”
“I want to know why I just defied my parents, why I need to stay here. If you can’t tell me, I can go to them and I’m sure they’ll tell me their side of things…”
I sat back, biting my tongue to keep from saying what I wanted to say. It wouldn’t do to piss her off right now, especially since I didn’t know how she would respond. But I also wasn’t entirely sure that dumping the truth on her like this was good, either. The doctor had said to let her memory come back slowly, to only tell her what she needed to know.
Did she need to know this?
“Fine. I’ll go—”
“No,” I said, grabbing the edge of her wheelchair as she tried to roll past me. “I’ll tell you.”
She stared at me, that old, defiant Harley back in her eyes. I took a deep breath, releasing her chair and pressing my hands together again.
“When you and I began seeing each other, you were extremely reluctant. Philip broke your heart, and you didn’t trust many people. Then I come marching into your life, this cocky person from Los Angeles, and I was the last person you were likely to trust, so it took a while before you would even go out with me, let alone let yourself care about me. We didn’t even sleep together…” I hesitated, watching her face closely for her reaction. She seemed okay, so I continued. “When we grew close, we had a discussion about our previous lovers, and you asked me not to tell you about my past. I honored that a little too well, I think.”
“I asked you not to tell me?”
I nodded. “You said you wanted to pretend that the day I met you was the beginning of everything. You said it wasn’t important to you to know whom I’d dated, whom I loved, whom I didn’t.”
She rubbed her casted leg again. “So you didn’t.”
“I didn’t. And then you moved out here; we got engaged; and we planned a wedding. It was going to be a beautiful affair here in Los Angeles. We rented out a beautiful garden downtown, had a priest, all the guests coming. Everything was set.”
“And I called it off because of a snafu at the county office.”
She made it sound so trivial. It hadn’t felt trivial at the time.
“You wouldn’t let me explain. All you could hear was that I was married, and that convinced you that I’d been lying to you all along. I tried to convince you that I wouldn’t do that, that I wouldn’t have taken you down there if I had known you would find out that way, but you wouldn’t listen.”
“I moved out?”
“You rented a little house downtown, not far from where you were working on the mural for Margaret.”
“Why didn’t I go back to Texas?”
“I don’t know, really. I was hoping it was because it wasn’t really over between us. I wanted to believe that it was because you were upset, but you weren’t ready to end things between us completely.”
“But you don’t know for sure.”
“I don’t.”
She adjusted her position in the chair, a low moan slipping from between her lips as she did. I wanted to insist she go back to her bedroom, take her pill, and relax a little. But I knew she didn’t want to be fussed over. Not now.
“I want to see it,” she said after a few minutes.
“What?”
“The house I was renting. Maybe it’ll help me remember.”
An image flashed through my mind, the high steps in front of the house covered in roses I’d bought and had delivered. Every day. For a week.
“The steps are too steep. We’d never be able to get the wheelchair up there.” I sat forward and touched her knee lightly. “There’s plenty of time. The doctor said you shouldn’t push things, that it would come back naturally if it comes back at all.”
She nodded. “I know. I just…I feel like something is missing, you know? I just want to get on with my life.”
“Patience was never your strong point.”
She smiled then, her eyes meeting mine for the first time since her father barged into the house.
“Thank you,” she said, touching my hand. “I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”
I shrugged. “I love you, Harley. And I’ve always believed that what happened three months ago was just a blip. We’re meant to be together.”
Her smile widened briefly, but then pain shot through her expression. I’d had enough. I stood and swept her out of the wheelchair, carrying her to the small bedroom at the back of the house she’d been living in since coming home from the hospital. Her pills were on the bedside table. I fed one to her, then got the heating pad that seemed to be the only thing that could relieve the worst of the pain before the pill began working.
She let me stretch out on the bed beside her; she even allowed me to cradle her head against my chest. As we lay there, I could almost believe that everything was going to be okay, that Harley was coming back to me. I held on to that hope with everything I had.
Chapter 15
Harley
They removed my cast today. I wasn’t completely free of restraint because they replaced it with a removable boot to continue to support the section of the tibia that was broken the worst and continued to resist healing. My physical therapist said that I would be free of the boot in a few weeks if I kept working as hard as I’d been doing these last few weeks. I couldn’t wait to have my body back. This broken thing felt wrong, like it belonged to someone else. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t know the woman looking back. My hair was growing, but it was still so short—like a little boy’s cut. But my collarbone was finally healed—though it still ached from time to time—and my ribs were good. If I could just get this leg to heal…
I stood in front of the mirror in the bedroom that had been my primary space since leaving the hospital and stared at the summer dress I was wearing. It flowed nicely from my shoulders, the thin, white material making my pale skin look healthier than it really was. I don’t know what was more exciting: that I’d gotten myself dressed without having to call for Xander to fix my buttons or zipper, or that I was looking at myself in the mirror without the wheelchair I’d grown to hate.
Independence was an amazing thing.
There was still pain when I walked, but not nearly as much as there had been weeks ago when I first left the hospital. And it was clunky. But it wasn’t as if I was going to a ball anytime soon.
I stepped out of the bedroom and slipped out a back door to the impressive porch that flowed from one end of the house to the other. I loved being outside. It probably came from growing up with a father who was a large animal vet. While my parents were caring for the horses and cows belonging to their clients, I was running around the ranches, dogs and horses some of my closest friends.
I curled up in a chair in a sunbeam, enjoying the late afternoon heat on my face. My mom used to say I was a cat in another life because I’d always enjoyed bathing in sunlight. She might be right.
My accident happened almost two months ago. Yet, I still had no memory of the last three years. There were little flashes here and there, but nothing concrete. My memories of the night Xander proposed were the closest I’d come to remembering anything substantial. And that had this fuzziness around the edges that suggested there was something still missing.
I was beginning to worry that I would never remember.
Xander was wonderful. He didn’t push me, but he was always ready with answers when I had questions. When I wanted time alone, he left me alone. When I wanted to hang out with him, he made himself available. I couldn’t imagine a man being any more considerate to a woman. And that confused the hell out of me.
Why had I called off the wedding? So what if he was married before?
I knew there had to be more to the story. However, I didn’t know how to figure out what that was.
“Harley? There you are!”
I turned and watched as Margaret Wallace walked around the side of the house toward me. She was wearing an expensive dress that was clearly not designed to be worn anywhere near nature, along with a pair of sunglasses that made her look vaguely like Jackie O. I wanted to laugh, as I watched her nearly trip over a low rose bush, but I bit it back. I didn’t know Margaret that well, but I knew her reputation. She was one of the hottest authorities on modern art in the country at the moment. At least, she was three years ago. And she owns the art gallery where every up-and-coming artist wants his or her stuff shown. I would have done just about anything, three years ago, to have my stuff shown in her gallery. So it was a little unreal for me to realize that I’d been working for her for months and that we’re actually friends of some sort.
“I’ve been knocking on the door,” Margaret said, as she fell into a chair beside me. “I thought you’d gone out or something.”
I patted my boot. “This is much easier, but I still can’t drive.”
“I’m surprised Xander hasn’t hired a driver for you.”
I smiled because he’d offered. However, I turned him down, not wanting to be a financial burden on him—even though it was pretty obvious he could afford it.
“So, we’re opening the community center this weekend.”
“The one where I was doing the mural?”
“Yes. Construction is finally done. I was beginning to think we were never going to finish.”
“Xander said the center is for low-income kids?”
Margaret glanced at me, then smiled a little wryly. “I keep forgetting you’ve lost your memory. Yes, it is. I started it almost a year ago when a friend of mine suggested that someone should do something about the kids running around the neighborhood with nothing to do. Xander found the space, and he donated the security system. Another friend ran several fundraisers to pay for the renovations, and you were providing the art.”
“The mural wasn’t finished?”
“No. But it’s close enough that only those with a good eye will be able to tell.”
“I’d like to see it.”
Margaret’s eyebrows rose. “Yes?”
Before I could nod, she was out of her chair and grabbing my hand.
“Let’s go!”
She drove a Jaguar that was complicated to get inside with my new boot, but it was so much easier than it might have been with the thigh-high cast I’d had before. Margaret chatted as we drove across town, but I didn’t hear much of it. I was busy staring out the window, waiting for the landscape to prompt a memory or two. However, none of it looked even vaguely familiar.
“Xander said I lived over here for a while.”
Margaret gestured vaguely toward the west. “You had a tiny house over there for a couple of mont
hs.” She glanced at me. “He told you about the called-off wedding, then.”
“He did.”
“Did he tell you everything?” She slowed the car at a stop light and looked at me, her eyes searching my face for a long moment. “Did he tell you about—?”
“The divorce that wasn’t on record? Yes.”
“Then you know it was my fault.”
I glanced at her. “What do you mean?”
“Paperwork has never really been my thing, you know. I thought it got to where it should have gone, but…well, you know.”
“No, I don’t.”
I had no idea what she was talking about.
She eased the car forward, and we rounded a curve. The building on the left was instantly familiar to me, but I couldn’t tell anyone why. It just…well, it just was.
It was a long, low building made of concrete blocks. It was painted a soft brown on the outside, but I think that was a new addition. I felt that it was once white with the sheen of dirt and debris all over it. The brown was definitely an improvement. There were signs naming it The Wilshire Community Center, with another that had Margaret’s smiling face on it, marking her as the organizer of the project.
I was a little surprised to see my face adorning another of these signs. It was taken before the accident—obviously—my hair was long, almost to my waist, and I was smiling at the camera like one of those lawyers you see on the side of city buses. It was kind of creepy, looking at my own face and not really recognizing the woman who was staring back.
“When was that taken?”
Margaret pulled to a stop in the small parking lot besides the building. “I don’t know. You gave it to me a week or two before the accident. I never really had a chance to ask you about it.”
We got out and headed inside. The main doors opened into a lobby that was furnished the way a teenager would furnish his own room, complete with mushroom chairs and video games. Past the reception desk, there was a hallway that opened into various classroom-type areas where kids could read their favorite books, watch television, get help with their homework, or work on art projects.
“This room was your idea,” Margaret said, gesturing to the large room that was furnished only with easels and supply shelves. “You said the students didn’t get enough art instruction at school and would appreciate this sort of thing. We hired a young art teacher last week to oversee the project. She’s quite enthusiastic.”
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