And there was no way he was going to, not out loud.
He might have barely whispered them while I was sleeping or distractedor when he was otherwise sure I wouldn’t hear him. He had always been a man like none other and that was why no one could ever take his place for me.
Together, we were a perfect disaster.
“Remember, I will always protect you, like the shell protects the pearl.” As I listened to his intense voice, a thousand butterflies took flight, fluttering through the air. And then he smiled at me and squeezed me tighter in his arms, the only place I ever wanted to be, the only place I thought of as…home.
***
I lifted my eyelids slowly, taking note of how my lashes clung to one another. Colorful walls gave way to a dull, achromatic white. The scent of Neil faded, as did his lovely voice. The heat of his body was replaced by the biting cold of an empty space.
I glanced around in search of whatever device was emitting that strange beeping noise in time with my heartbeat and spotted a machine right next to me.
My head hurt, as did my abdomen and shoulder. I tried to move, but I just couldn’t.
What is going on?
“Don’t crowd her; she’s still going to be a bit out of it,” came an unfamiliar woman’s voice. I did feel fuzzy-headed and weak.
“She’s waking up…” murmured a voice I easily recognized. “Sweetheart,” she added. I shifted my gaze to my mother, who was speaking in her usual gentle tones.
I looked into her face, which seemed drawn and weary, and forced myself to give her a wavering smile.
I was already feeling tired, my eyelids straining to stay open. There was a tube in my nose that kept me from moving the way I wanted to, and my body felt weak and sluggish.
“How are you feeling, little one?” My mother rubbed my arm and gazed at me with misty eyes. “You’re in the hospital. You were in an accident, and you hit your head pretty hard, but you’re going to be fine,” she reassured me quickly.
I shifted my gaze from her face to the rest of the room, and suddenly, I recalled everything.
I had been in a car accident.
I was supposed to be heading back to Detroit to take back my life. Instead, I had almost lost it. It was a miracle that I’d survived. I remembered the lancing pain I’d felt on impact, the blood all over my clothes. I remembered the driver slumped lifelessly in the front seat, his face unrecognizable, gazing dully off into another world.
It hadn’t been a nightmare after all. It was all real.
I felt disconnected from everything around me, and bursts of pain in my head made me squeeze my eyes shut before slowly reopening them.
“My head hurts,” I rasped. My mother, alarmed, looked immediately to another woman, who must have been my doctor, to judge by her scrubs and white coat.
“That’s absolutely normal,” she reassured my mom. “The headaches will be more frequent in the beginning.” She spoke in a calm, polite tone. She was a young woman with an aura of dependability and a sweet smile.
“How long…” I licked my lower lip, which felt dry and chapped, before continuing. “How long have I been here?” I asked.
The doctor gave a sigh before replying, “About ten days. You’ve been in a medically induced coma.”
I stared at her in shock.
Ten days?
I tried to wrinkle my forehead, but my skin there felt like it was on fire. I lifted an arm to touch my head and felt the rough texture of gauze meet my fingertips.
“That’s nothing, sweetheart, just an injury you got in the crash.”
Mom gathered my hand in hers and sat down beside my bed, probably trying to calm me down. But it all felt like a dream to me. A very surreal dream.
Meanwhile, the doctor continued her explanation as she patted my arm.
“We chose to keep you in a medically induced coma as a precaution, Selene. This is standard treatment for patients who have sustained traumatic brain injuries. In your case, your CT scan revealed an intracranialhemorrhage—bleeding in your brain—that had resulted in a hematoma, basically a blood clot. We needed to give your body and brain time to rest and heal so the hematoma could be reabsorbed. Fortunately, it was a smaller hematoma, and the impact on your brain was not severe.”
