“Yesterday,” Liz replies. “You’re doing really well.”
Yesterday?I lift the sheet to inspect myself again, only to be newly baffled by theboobs. “That simply cannot be right!” Imutter. I mean, I had boobs yesterday, obviously, but not likethis. I must be a C cup! “Where have the extra two cups come from overnight?”
All three glance at the plastic tumblers on the bedside table, striving to keep up.
“Evie, how old are you?” the psychiatrist asks.
“Sixteen. But something is very wrong.”
He puts his clipboard on the bed and places his hands in the position of prayer, tapping his fingertips against his nose in thought, as if this is the first time in his career that he’s encountered someone who has changed shape overnight. “I know this might come as a shock,” he divulges after a long pause, “but according to your driver’s license and medical records, you’re twenty-nine.”
Twenty-nine?“See, there you go! You’ve clearly mixed me up with someone else. I don’t even have a license, only my learner’s permit.”
He nods. But not to agree, to placate me—I can tell. “This sort of confusion can be common after a car accident.”
He goes on, but I’ve stopped listening. There is just no way that I am twenty-nine and married. Or whatever it’s called when your husband is dead. Widowed.
“I’m opposed to marriage!” I argue. “I am one hundred percent a career girl. I haven’t even finished high school. I can’t betwice my age.”
As I shake my head, another wave of hair falls across my face and I sweep it away, then grab it and look at the color more closely. It’s definitely not my natural shade. But I’ve never dyed it, because Mum won’t let me. Not even pink for crazy hair day.
“Is there a mirror?”
Liz leaves the room and returns with a compact.
I flick it open and confront the frantic woman—yes,woman—staring back at me with shocked blue eyes.
“Fuck!” I say. “Sorry.” It’s an immediate detention if the teachers catch you swearing.
It’s not just the red mark on my neck from the seat belt. Or the dark hair. It’s that my freckles have faded, the way Mum always promised they would. And there are tiny creases around my eyes and mouth. They’re not full-on wrinkles or anything—in fact, they’re sort of hard to see, because everything is slightly blurry. I squint at my reflection and Liz asks if I want my glasses.
“Oh, I don’t wear glasses,” I brag, just as she passes me a pair of sleek tortoiseshell Prada frames I couldn’t possibly afford, which bring everything into perfect focus.
And by “everything,” I mean the unbelievable set of facts that I appear to be an adult woman with prescription lenses, fine lines on my face, additional pounds on my frame, and a dead husband I never wanted.
2
Half an hour later, my medical team is still parading in and out of my room as I sift through a stylish Gucci tote for my phone. I fling everything onto the bed, producing a stash of luxury makeup, keys to a Jeep, and a small white flip-top case containing a useless set of headphones without cords.
There’s a phone, but it can’t be mine. It’s so big. And there’s no ON button! I’m swiping my finger all over the giant screen when it suddenly springs to life and I’m confronted with thirty-eight missed call notifications and a barrage of messages.
“What just happened?” I ask Liz, who’s checking my blood pressure. Again.
“It’s face ID.”
Like in science fiction?
“It recognizes your face,” she says. “You would have set it up when you first got the phone.”
So my phone knows me better than I know myself? I’m madly scrolling through my contacts list now, desperate to call Mum to tell her the bad news: I’m old.
And the good news: I’m awake!
And the other bad news: Her son-in-law is dead.
Son-in-law!
My finger hovers over his name in my contacts list. Oliver. Evidence that what they are telling me might be true. If it is, I wonder how many thousands of times I might have dialed this very number and discussed something marital, like what was for dinner or whether he’d remembered to pay the gas bill. Perhaps the screen would light up with his name and my heart would skip a beat like it does for women in novels, because we were the type of couple who direct-debited all our bills and left phone calls purely for romantic exchanges like “Pack a bag, Evie, I’m sweeping you off for the weekend!”
