Page 44 of The Do-Over
“Oh.” He looked at his hands. “That was the glass from the window in the car.”
She swore and hurried away to get her first aid kit. In truth, she was relieved to be putting some space between Rob and herself. It would give her a minute to think about how she was going to deal with his memory loss.
He thinks we’re still in high school. He thinks the two of us are still together.
She had to tell him the truth, if for no other reason than that she couldn’t have him trying to touch her and kiss her while he was staying here. He needed to know how things really stood between them.
And there was also the matter of the award he had come here to accept. Would he be capable of standing up and receiving it if he believed he was the eighteen-year-old version of himself?
She returned to the kitchen, took his hands, and began to clean the cuts. Fortunately, they were fairly superficial, and there was no glass remaining in the wounds, so she sprayed them with antiseptic spray and bandaged them up.
“Thea,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Why did you ask me about the president?”
She sighed and looked at him. “Rob…don’t you notice anything…different about me?”
“The haircut?”
She shook her head. She knew what was happening. The haircut was distracting him from the more important changes. The gray in her hair. The lines around her eyes. The weight she had gained since her teenage days, and the new shape of her body. Thea liked her appearance, but she also knew perfectly well that she did not look like a teenager. She looked like a woman in her thirties.
Couldn’t Rob see it?
He was studying her. And now she saw a flicker of fear cross his face.
He does see. He just doesn’t want to.
“Rob,” she said quietly. “I’m thirty-five years old.”
He shook his head. “No,” he murmured.
She nodded. “And so are you.”
She felt his muscles tense. “I don’t understand.”
“You just…you must have hit your head really hard,” she said. “You’re dealing with profound memory loss.”
“But…no. I was just at the basketball game.” He looked at her beseechingly, as if getting her to agree to this was the key. “We won. You were there.”
She shook her head. “I’m sure we did win, but that was a long time ago, Rob. You went away to college at Larrimore. You played basketball for them. Then you became a doctor. You’ve lived a whole life since that game.”
“I can’t have,” he breathed.
“Listen, I’m really sorry to be laying this on you,” she said. “But try not to panic. In cases like this, patients often recover, and it will help you to know what’s going on so you can try to reform those neural pathways. Keeping you in the dark about it doesn’t do you any good, even though I know this might be really stressful.”
“How do you—are you a doctor too?” he asked. “You know so much about medicine.”
She couldn’t help smiling. It was a compliment she had never expected to receive from award-winning military doctor Rob Honeycutt. “I’m a nurse,” she said.
“So we—” He took a breath, and she could see that he was trying to remain calm. “We went to Larrimore together? The way we always planned?”
“No, that’s…that’s not what happened. I went to Iowa State.”
“Oh,” Rob said. She could see him processing the implications of that.
“I know this is a lot for you to deal with,” Thea said. “I have a guest room, but I’d really like you to stay where I can keep an eye on you tonight. Head injuries are nothing to mess around with.”
