“Then why did you ask Coop how you could remember someone you’d never met?”
Theo swallows, briefly closing his eyes. In a rasp, he says, “My doctor said I couldn’t get well unless I started talking again, unless I forced myself to. I didn’t want to do it for the first time in front of everyone last night at the party—”
“How did you know me, Theo?”
With a strangled cry, Theo runs over to his clothes, left in a pile on the floor on his side of the bed. He yanks on his jeans, shirt, and jacket while I sink farther and farther into the black delirium rising like floodwaters inside my mind.
They drugged him. Those sons of bitches at Acadia, that soulless bastard Dr. Garner—they fed him drugs, told him he’s schizophrenic, and brainwashed him into believing a miracle was mental illness.
I’m not having it. I’m not having any of it. This is my soul mate, and I won’t let anyone take him away from me.
Not again.
I shout, “You’re afraid of yellow balloons!”
Theo flinches as if I’ve punched him in the gut. Backing away slowly toward the bedroom door, he stares at me as I give witness to the truth of who he is at the absolute top of my lungs.
“Your mother’s name was Mary! Your father was Dan! When you were ten years old, you got a beagle and named him Snoopy!”
Theo slaps his hands over his ears. Shaking his head and still moving backward, his face crumples, and he starts to cry.
“You loved hot dogs and bear claws and Mad Max movies! You photographed lightning strikes and painted landscapes in oils! You proposed to me in the same place we first made love when we were sixteen, under the blooming acacia at our favorite spot in the bend in the Salt River! You had a tattoo of Matthew verse seven across your back, because you were a seeker who believed that the only way to get at the truth was to knock on every door until you found it!”
His sob tears a hole in my heart, but I have to keep going. I can’t stop, no matter how much he might want me to. I have to break through this wall of denial once and for all.
I step down from the mattress and stalk toward him, one step forward for each stumbling step he takes away, my body racked with tremors, my voice rising to a scream.
“And whether you choose to accept it or not, the truth is that you died at 12:02 in the morning on the seventeenth of May five years ago—your name was Cassidy Michael Dunn, and you were the love of my life!”
Crying openly now, Theo turns and sprints from the room.
As his footsteps pound hollowly down the stairs, I lose the strength in my legs. I sink to my knees, the room spinning. In a few moments, the front door slams with a boom that rattles the windows. The roar of a car engine breaks the still of the morning outside, followed by the angry squeal of tires spinning against pavement, then another roar as the car takes off at top speed down the street. I don’t have to look to know the car is mine. Theo obviously took my keys from my purse.
I kneel in the same spot for a long time, blank and drained. My mind doesn’t sharpen until I hear the wail of sirens far in the distance.
Then the blankness is replaced by a terror so powerful, I’m still frozen in place when the phone begins to ring.
* * *
I run.
I run so hard and with such focus, I don’t see Coop’s red truck blast past me down the boulevard leading into town. I can’t see anything, I can’t hear anything except the solemn voice of the young man calling from the hospital. The words play on a dark, terrible repeat inside my head.
“We found your number in his clothing. There’s been an accident.”
Accident.
Three simple syllables with the power to ruin lives.
I pump my arms and legs as hard as they can go, my chest heaving, hot tears streaming down my cheeks. I’m barefoot, but I don’t feel the cold asphalt of the road under my feet. I don’t feel the misty morning air on my face, or hear my harsh, labored gasps, or smell the sea breeze. I’m half-dead already.
If Theo’s gone by the time I get to the hospital, the rest of me will follow.
“Megan!”
My name sounds as if it’s been shouted at me from underwater. It’s muffled, distorted, a long way away. I keep running.
“Megan!”
A red truck pulls next to me in the street. The window is down. Coop is shouting my name. I remember I called him to come get me because I didn’t have a car, and sob in relief.
I slow just enough to yank open the door and throw myself inside. Without waiting for the door to close, Coop slams his foot against the gas pedal, and we rocket down the street.
“How bad is it?”
My teeth chatter so hard, I can barely manage to answer Coop’s question. “I don’t know. They didn’t say. They just said come quick.”