And then he was there, and the world lit up.
‘Hi,’ he said. He was smiling at me uncertainly as he approached my desk. I stayed on the other side, the solid wood a safety barrier between us. And it struck me then how different he seemed to the old Adam. The old Adam would have strutted in here like a peacock, ruffling his feathers, showing off, the preening and the parading all defences to shield how lonely he’d felt, how unloved by his family. Now, those defences had been stripped away and he was open, vulnerable.
Unfortunately, it only made him more attractive.
I smiled back. ‘Thanks for coming.’ I tried to sound formal, hoping it would help me avoid making any irrational decisions or doing anything stupid. ‘Take a seat.’
He sat down opposite me and I folded my arms. The air between us fizzled and I knew he could feel it too.
‘This is nice,’ he said, looking round the small office I shared with a colleague. It was deliberately simple with nothing too distracting.
‘Thank you.’
‘Do you see patients here?’
‘No, that’s usually in the treatment rooms down the corridor.’ I gestured vaguely in the direction of the door. Adam nodded.
‘So?’ He spread his hands out questioningly. ‘I’ve brought my guitar like you asked.’ He indicated the case he’d leaned up against the desk. ‘What next?’
I took a wobbly breath. ‘I’m happy to keep helping you,’ I said, the words coming out in a rush. Adam’s face lit up.
‘Really?’ He swiped at his eye. ‘Honestly, you don’t know what this means. I was so worried—’ His face flushed, something else I’d never seen the previously confident Adam do. He ran his thumbnail along the grain of the desk. ‘I was terrified I’d messed it up. That I’d scared you off.’
‘You didn’t.’
He looked up to meet my gaze. ‘I’m glad. I mean, I know you’re married and I know nothing can happen between us. So I’m sorry. Truly.’ He held his hand up in a mock-salute. ‘I promise to keep this strictly professional.’
Despite having planned to say that myself, I still felt the disappointment crush me as though someone was sitting on my chest. I nodded.
‘Thank you.’
The moment sat between us for a while, with neither of us speaking. But Adam didn’t look away and I felt my body heating up under his gaze as though it would burn right through into my soul. The tick of the ancient clock above the door was the only sound in the room, apart from the roaring in my ears.
I reached down and pulled a notebook out of the drawer beside me, breaking the spell.
‘I’m going to take notes while we work,’ I said, forcing the words through my parched throat.
‘Okay.’ He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk. ‘What do you need to know?’
‘First I need to write down what we’ve tried up to now.’ I scribbled on the pad. ‘And then I’m going to ask you for a few more details about your medical diagnosis, and what the doctors say regarding your chances of recovery.’ I looked up at him and tried to ignore the smile on his face.
‘Yup, that all sounds very professional and proper.’ There was no disguising the laugh in his voice now.
‘Adam,’ I warned. ‘This is serious.’
‘Sorry.’ He crossed his arms and waited. When I’d finished writing I looked up at him again. ‘So come on. Tell me as much as you can.’
So he told me again about his accident, about how doctors didn’t know whether he would ever regain his memory. He told me some more about his recovery, and how he’d been on his own in the hospital for three days before his parents had come to see him, and about how he kept waiting and waiting for someone else to visit. He told me about trying to discover his old self through social media, and the scraps of information he’d found out from the few friends who had visited, and how quickly he’d realised he didn’t want to go back there, to his old life, no matter what happened next. And he told me how lonely he’d been since he’d been back.
‘It’s almost as though I had no friends before. Not real ones anyway,’ he said. ‘I mean, I have all these numbers in my phone, but I don’t know who any of them are. A couple of people have messaged me to see how I am but even that petered out after the first couple of months.’ He rubbed his face. ‘I’m really scared I could just be a horrible person, Erin.’
‘You are not a horrible person,’ I said.
‘But how can you be sure of that?’
‘I know you, remember?’
He shook his head in frustration. ‘Yeah, but you said yourself we haven’t seen each other for years. And it doesn’t sound as though I was very nice to you even when we were together.’ My face burned. ‘But if I mattered to anyone at all, how come nobody has come to see me more than a handful of times, or rung me?’ He hung his head and looked down at his lap. ‘How come nobody seems to care?’
