Page 58 of The Do-Over
“Everyone in Deer Ridge knew. You know how this town is.” She shook her head. “Or maybe you don’t. I guess you’ve got no memory of the way things got after you went off to college.”
“What do you mean? What happened when I went to college?”
“Well, it really changed when…” She paused for a moment. “Larrimore went to the Final Four. While you were on the team.”
“I got to go to the Final Four?” he breathed.
He looked half amazed and half devastated, and Thea understood. The Rob she had known in high school would have considered it an absolute dream to play in the Final Four. Now he was hearing that the dream had happened and that he had lost his memory of it. It was all too much to take in, she was sure.
“You carried the team,” she murmured. “You were their best player. Everyone said so. And Deer Ridge was just wild with excitement, supporting you. Nobody could believe that local boy Rob Honeycutt was so big time. You were famous around here even before you became a hero military doctor.”
“I’m not famous,” Rob objected.
“Yeah, you are,” Thea said. “Everyone knows who you are. And when the word spread that you were coming home to receive another award, everyone was proud. Everyone was excited. It’s all anybody in town has been talking about for weeks now.”
“I can’t believe that,” Rob said. “Everyone in town knows I’m back?” He frowned. “Do they all know about the accident?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Thea said. “I haven’t told anyone about it, apart from the people at the hospital in Ames. I mean, I’m sure your hotel knows you didn’t show up. The people there might have some questions. But you know how people are. They’ll make up their own stories. They’ll probably tell themselves you saw what the weather was like and decided to stay in Chicago for a few more days instead of trying to drive through it.”
“Which is what I should have done,” he sighed.
She reached out automatically and rested a hand on his shoulder. It was as natural as breathing, when he looked so dejected. Of course she was going to do everything she could to comfort him. “It’s all right,” she said quietly. “You’re going to get through this. You’re going to get your memories back.”
“But you can’t be sure,” he said.
“I have a plan.”
“You do?”
She nodded. “At the hospital, they told me we could work to stimulate your memories, to help you remember the things you had forgotten. So we’ll do that.”
“How?”
“Tonight was a start. Familiar food is a sense trigger. That will help rebuild the neural pathways that might be damaged. And then talking about the past is a good thing as well. We really should have started with the things you did remember and built forward. That’s what we’ll do from now on, instead of working backward.
He reached up and gripped her wrist. “Thank you, Thea,” he murmured. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”
Thea felt herself tremble.
It felt so normal to be back with him like this. It felt as if no time had gone by.
And that was dangerous.
She couldn’t afford to get caught up in feelings that she had closed herself off from a long time ago. After all, the goal here was to help Rob remember what had happened. And once he remembered, Thea was sure, he would want to go back to the life he had made for himself. The life in which she was a distant memory.
This couldn’t last.
She couldn’t lose sight of that.
