by Serena Bell
But now, the fact that he’d called his mother and not her, the fact that he hadn’t returned her calls, seemed ominous. It went, part and parcel, with his failure to see her.
“Phoebe! Trina!”
Hunter’s voice, so deep that she could feel its lowest vibrations—and not only in her eardrums—rang out.
“Thanks so much for coming out to welcome me home!”
Hearty. Jovial. Impersonal, almost formal. He reached out to hug her, but in the hug, she felt the careful distance that men keep from women they’re not interested in. Maybe his wounded torso was sore.
Or maybe that was a convenient theory she was clinging to so she wouldn’t fall on him and beg to know what the heck was going on.
His eyes, as he drew away from her, held only a faint curiosity, as if she were someone he had once felt something for and now was wondering what all the fuss had been about.
Clara was still talking a mile a minute, softball this and theater that, and Hunter was beaming at his daughter proudly and asking questions. Meanwhile, Phoebe, who hadn’t even rated a hug but only a hair ruffle, Hunter’s huge hand almost dwarfing her blond head, looked small and lost at Trina’s side. Exactly how she felt, herself.
“What’s for dinner?” Phoebe whispered.
That made Trina smile for real. You could always count on kids to get down to essentials, even when there was an emotional mess around them.
“Spaghetti and pesto. Garlic bread. Salad.”
“Yum. At Hunter and Clara’s?”
She didn’t let Phoebe hear her hesitation. “Yes.” Because if they didn’t go back to Hunter and Clara’s, they had nowhere else to go. Trina’s apartment was still being sublet. The plan had been for them to stay, and even if Trina could hatch an alternative, they’d have to go back to Hunter and Clara’s to gather their things.
Trina thought, suddenly, of the voicemail on her phone from Phoebe’s dad, Stefan. It was still there, a periodic reminder that she hadn’t called him back.
It was an alternative. Just not an alternative she’d been able to consider with Hunter’s promise so vivid in her mind.
She had to believe that promise still held. At least for now. She had to have that much faith in him, no matter how strange things felt.
Besides, she had cooked dinner, the most recent act of service she’d performed—willingly, happily!—to take care of Hunter and his daughter and his house. And maybe it was only a defense against the shards forming in her chest, but she got mad. Because no matter what the hell had happened to him over the last eight months, he’d said those things to her. And no matter how tough the last year had been for him, he owed her more than a formal thank you and an awkward hug. It wasn’t the changes she’d made to her life that bugged her so much. Quitting her jobs, moving into his house, and accepting the generous stipend he’d offered for Clara’s care—those were just economic decisions, and although it would take awhile for her to get her feet back under her, she’d do it. No—the harder part was that she’d allowed herself to love him. And trust him. Because he’d told her—because he’d convinced her—that it was a safe thing for her to do.
He owed her one hell of an explanation for his behavior. And if he didn’t deliver it the moment they were alone, she was going to demand to know what the f—heck—was going on with him.
—
Hunter stared into the open suitcase he’d laid on his bed.
There were pieces missing from his life.
He remembered leaving Clara with his mother. But listening to his daughter’s bubbling, joyful stories of the last year she’d spent living with Trina and Phoebe in his house, it had become apparent that something was very wrong.
In the space of that realization, he’d gone from confused to freaked out.
Why would he have left Clara with Trina? And why wouldn’t he remember leaving Clara with Trina?
In the hospital, they’d asked him if he could remember the battle that had sidelined him. And he’d said no.
Retrograde amnesia, they’d said. It meant forgetting things that had happened before a traumatic incident. Very common after trauma. There had been no evident blow to the head, but the battle had been chaotic and he’d been separated from his squad. The doctors hadn’t been certain whether the long period of unconsciousness that followed had been the result of bleeding and his collapsed lung or something more ominous. So they’d given him a test called a Glasgow Coma Scale and asked him all sorts of questions to determine what he did and didn’t remember.
They explained that retrograde amnesia could stretch back days, weeks, or months before an incident, so to rule that out, they asked him if he could remember the events leading up to the battle, which had taken place in a small village in the north.
Yes.
He’d reconstructed everything he could. The orders he’d received, the planning and preparation, how he’d distracted his squad the night before with a Skype session with Zach Jones, the Seattle Grizzlies quarterback and a friend of a friend.
The doctors had asked Hunter to let them know if any other holes appeared in his memory, and he’d promised to do so, but nothing had shown itself.
Not till now.
Now there were holes all over the place.
His mother seemed to have spent most of the last year on the back of a Gold Wing motorcycle driven by some guy named Ray who owned a double-wide in Southern California. A guy named Ray who, ostensibly, Hunter had met and liked. If the blushes and glow were any indication, his mother was in love.
Clara had gotten involved with theater, something she seemed to think wasn’t news to him. She’d also grown an absurd number of inches and—well, she looked more sixteen than twelve. Could all that have happened in a year?
And there was that look Trina had given him. Not one look, actually—a whole series, like she was wrestling with big emotions and, more to the point, like he should do something about it.
The first time that expression had crossed her face, something had taken a dive in the pit of his stomach. The last woman who’d looked at him with that much disappointment had been Dee, his late wife. It was the kind of look you only gave someone you were involved with. Which would explain so much else—Trina’s presence with Phoebe at the airport, her beautifully lettered and intricately drawn WELCOME HOME, HUNTER sign, the fact that she’d been so painfully quiet on the way home.
It would also explain the way she’d snuck looks at him throughout dinner, as if trying to figure him out, while he’d listened quietly to the girls’ chatter, saying as little as possible and desperately trying to piece together the puzzle of his own mind. There must have been two battles in a small village in the north, and somehow he’d combined them in his head to make one, so that what he remembered as the “before” of his injury had actually happened at some point in a past deployment.
And if that was true, it was quite possible he didn’t remember anything from the whole of his most recent deployment, or the weeks immediately preceding it.
Jesus.
How much time had he lost? How much of his life? How much of himself? God, that was disturbing to think about. He’d always thought of amnesia as waking up and not knowing who you were. He knew who he was—
Or…
He knew who he’d been, more than a year ago…
But since then, what had happened to him?
Obviously, something significant between him and Trina. Something that had made him trust her enough to leave his daughter and house in her care. That had put that look on her face, as if he owed her an explanation.
What had he done? He’d been so damn careful, since Dee, not to lead anyone on. Not to create expectations he couldn’t meet.
“Hunter?”
She stood behind him, her posture tentative. With those big blue eyes, heart-shaped face, and simple, straight blond hair, she looked barely out of girlhood.
There was something painful and intimate about her presence there in the doorway of
his bedroom, as if she belonged there, as if she’d stood there many times before.
“I know you need time. I don’t want to push. I just— When you left—”
He felt like he was on the edge of a cliff. That if she kept talking, he would plunge over it.
“You said—”
But he didn’t want to know what he’d said. He didn’t want to know what he’d promised or what she expected. He didn’t want to know anything at all. If she wasn’t a stranger to him, she was the very next best thing, and he didn’t want her confessions or her fear, the open rawness of her expression. He wanted her to close herself up and take herself away, because he was not who she thought he was. He didn’t know that man.
He was someone else now.
“I guess I just wondered. If you thought it still could be true.” She looked like she might be trying not to cry, and he cursed his lost self for whatever expectations he’d set up in her.
There was nothing for it but the truth.
“I don’t remember,” he admitted. “I don’t remember what I said, or what we did—”
He took a deep breath.
“I don’t remember any of it.”
Chapter 3
“What do you mean, you don’t remember?”
But even as she asked the question, she understood. She’d heard stories about soldiers with traumatic brain injuries, ones who had trouble remembering what had happened before a shock, or who couldn’t code new memories of what had happened since.
She felt a sudden, unwanted sense of relief. His feelings hadn’t changed. He hadn’t changed his mind. His mind had changed.
“I didn’t think—I didn’t think you hurt your head.”
“I didn’t think I did, either. But maybe I did. I knew I didn’t remember the battle. But I thought I remembered everything before. And now—everything’s wrong. Ever since I got off the plane, it’s like I’ve stumbled into an alternate reality where I’m out of sync. I think I lost a year.”
He sounded like Hunter and he looked like Hunter, and there was so much fear in his voice that all she wanted to do was to put her arms around him and comfort him. But everything about his body language was a gigantic back-the-fuck-off. And as quickly as it had come, the relief vanished and she was overtaken by panic. It was one thing to imagine that something during the late part of his deployment had killed his feelings for her. It was another thing entirely to imagine that those feelings, as far as he was concerned, had never existed.
“Okay,” she said. Trying to be calm. “So you’re telling me that you don’t have a known brain injury, right?”
“Right.”
“But you think you have amnesia?”
“Well, you tell me,” he said. “The last thing I remember for sure was leaving Clara with my mom on an autumn day.”
She stared at him. He’d left Clara with her, on a midsummer day.
“I know,” he said.
“But—how do you lose a year? More? Without realizing it?”
“I’m not completely sure,” he admitted. “But it’s all been total chaos since I was wounded, and my team is still in the middle of nowhere, and so—I guess with no one to corroborate it seemed like I had all the pieces, and it didn’t become obvious till I got home that I don’t.”
“So you—you don’t remember anything?”
“I don’t remember you,” he said, in a low tone of confession. “I mean, I remember you. Phoebe’s mom. But—”
He didn’t have to finish the sentence. A horror was beginning to descend over her. This isn’t the same man who left me. Grief gripped her.
But that made no sense. He was here, not dead. And he was the same man she’d fallen for.
Except it didn’t work like that. The man she’d known before had fallen as hard for her as she had for him. And this man was looking at her—
Well, he was looking at her dispassionately, the way you’d look at someone who held information you wanted, but nothing more.
All those emotions, everything they’d grown to feel together, all those weeks of sliding, slowly, toward each other, so gradually that they hadn’t even been able to admit it at first…
All those conversations, the “No, we shouldn’t; it would be too awkward and we can’t endanger the girls’ friendship over a passing lust frenzy…”
All his confessions about what held him back.
All hers.
They hadn’t happened to him.
It was—
It was as if she’d been alone, as if she’d dreamt those eight amazing weeks, as if she’d invented a fantasy him…
As if they’d never happened at all.
Standing there with the man she’d been planning to spend the rest of her life with, she felt an overwhelming, suffocating loneliness.
She gave herself a moment to wallow in it, then pushed it aside. She didn’t like to feel sorry for herself. She never had. If there was a solution to be found, if research or hard work or pure stubbornness could yield results, she would not dwell on the downside.
“You have to go to the doctor.”
“Yeah. I’d figured that much out.”
“They’ll know more. They’ll be able to tell you if it’s permanent. I mean, people recover from amnesia, right? That’s what happens in the movies. There’s a big a-ha moment, right when there’s some major crisis and he has to remember his past in order to avoid making the same mistake twice, or to apprehend the killer, or whatever.”
He laughed, but it was a humorless laugh. “Yeah, but don’t they also always have a doctor saying, ‘I don’t know. You could remember in a day, a week, a month, a year, or possibly never’?”
“Yes,” she admitted, and they were both quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Let’s not borrow trouble. Let’s see what they say.”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wondered if they were presumptuous. Let’s. Let us. Us.
Once before in her life, she’d let herself get used to the idea of us. Let herself get used to the comfort of knowing someone felt the same way about her as she felt about him. And once before, her life had been terribly altered by the discovery that she’d been wrong.
This was why she’d resisted falling for Hunter in the first place. This was why she’d kept their relationship a secret from the girls all this time. Because you couldn’t count on us.
Hunter had convinced her you could. He’d made her believe it. But he’d been wrong.
“So we were…?” He inclined his head questioningly.
“Involved. Yes.”
“How involved?”
There was something charmingly male and guileless about the question that made her half smile, despite how lost she felt. Of course, like the thirteen-year-old boy trapped inside him, he wanted to know first off whether they’d slept together. Next, he’d want to know whether he’d been good at it.
“Very,” she said, remembering their last night together and then wishing she hadn’t as a wave of sadness washed over her.
For a moment there was something in his eyes. A dark glimmer. And she waited, breathless, for him to say what she hoped to hear. We could try again. Or, better yet, There is something so familiar about the way I feel right now. As if I’m falling all over again.
But then the look was gone. And all she saw in his rugged, handsome face was regret and guilt.
—
Maybe if he weren’t so tired, maybe then he’d have been able to give her what her eyes were pleading for. But ever since he’d been ripped open, he’d felt a thousand years old. It was harder to catch his breath. His blood seemed to surge pell-mell through his veins and arteries, a feeling like an adrenaline rush but for no good reason.
“Do you believe me?” she whispered.
Maybe he should have been more cynical, more suspicious, but it hadn’t actually occurred to him that she might be lying. She’d never seemed deceitful. He wasn’t rolling in dough, and he didn’t own anything worth committing fraud over.
She wasn’t asking him for anything anyway. And there was the matter of all the other missing pieces, such as Clara’s giant leap forward developmentally and his mother’s mysterious relationship with the motorcycle-loving Ray. No, there was a year missing from his life, and it was at least remotely plausible that during that year he might have found his way into Trina’s pants.
After all…
He tried to assess her without appearing to ogle. He’d always thought of her as Phoebe’s “pretty mom,” without any designs on her. There had always been a good reason not to look too closely or too hungrily. He was married. She was his wife’s friend. She was his daughter’s best friend’s mother. She was a mom in a small community where word got around, a mom who appeared to have enough of a struggle to keep her head above water that she didn’t need anyone tomcatting around.
And, of course, he’d had very strict rules for himself about casual sex. As in, he didn’t do it. Or, he didn’t do it anymore. You only had to have one incident where K-I-S-S-I-N-G led to marriage and a baby in a baby carriage before you realized that skipping the love part of the equation could only lead to trouble.
So, yeah, if he’d admired the flare of Trina’s ass or the generous curves swelling her clingy T-shirt, he’d kept those thoughts dead and buried.
But when he looked at her more closely now…
Her big eyes and delicious mouth gave her a sex-kitten appeal that he’d somehow overlooked.
Although, of course, he hadn’t overlooked it. He’d apparently sampled it.
And what else?
Damn, it was frustrating. Had they been good together? What had she been like?
He knew so little about her. She’d gotten pregnant young, but he didn’t actually know how young. She’d never married Phoebe’s dad, who was an actor on a well-known TV show (something Phoebe brought up as frequently as possible in conversation). Phoebe’s dad had periodically sent extravagant gifts to her—he knew because Dee had told him—but didn’t pay regular child support. Trina worked long hours, sometimes more than one job, to hang onto their small apartment in the highly ranked district where Phoebe and Clara went to school.