“What?” she asked, blinking fast.
“Do I know you?” I repeated. “You looking at me like you seen a ghost,” I giggled, though I was serious as hell.
The bottle slipped from Giani’s hand, and before I could react, she threw herself at me.
“Oh my God,” she cried, wrapping both arms around me so tightly it almost knocked me off balance. “Bitch, where the fuck have you been? I looked for you everywhere.”
Her body was shaking against mine, and when she pulled back to look at me again, tears filled her eyes.
“Do you know how worried I’ve been?” she asked before pulling me into another hug.
I stood there stiffly at first, too caught off guard to react, but the longer she held onto me, the harder it became to ignore theache spreading through my chest. Nobody had hugged me like that since I woke up in that hospital, and nobody had looked relieved to see me alive.
Slowly, my body began to relax against hers.
“Y’all know each other for real?” Tiffany looked between us, confused as hell. “What the fuck is really going on?”
Giani wiped quickly under her eyes before grabbing my face in both hands.
“This my best friend,” she said, staring at me like she couldn’t believe I was standing there. “This my fucking best friend.”
“Wait a minute. Hold the fuck on.” Tiffany held up a hand. “If she’s your best friend, then why she over here acting like she don’t know you?”
Giani’s expression fell, and her eyes returned to mine. “She probably don’t remember me,” she answered quietly.
“I lost my memory after the accident. I don’t remember much of anything,” I admitted.
Giani stared at me for a second before her hand covered her mouth.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, and this time, the tears fell from her eyes. “That’s why you never came back.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Giani dropped her hand and shook her head slowly. “After the accident, you were in the hospital for a little while, and then one day they told everybody you got transferred somewhere else.” Hurt crept into her voice as she spoke. “I kept calling, trying to find out where they moved you, but they wouldn’t tell me nothing because I wasn’t a family member. I wish I had lied and said I was your sister or something.”
Tiffany frowned. “That’s crazy.”
“I sat with you almost every day up until you were moved,” Giani continued, still looking at me. “Did you have a duffel bag with clothes and shoes in your room when you woke up?”
I nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I had on when I left the hospital.”
Giani let out a shaky breath. “That was me,” she said softly. “I brought that up there for you because I knew your ass would’ve hated that hospital gown.”
A small laugh escaped me. “You were right. When I woke up, and my ass was out, I damn near had a heart attack,” I joked, though what I was wearing was the furthest thing from my mind when I opened my eyes. “But seriously, you really came up there every day?”
“Pretty much.” Giani shrugged, but emotion still thickened her voice. “You scared the fuck outta me, Koko. One minute we was together, and then the next, I’m getting a phone call saying—” she stopped talking. “You know what? Let’s not get into that right now. My cousin is having a party. Let’s have fun and catch up later. Is that cool?”
“Yeah, that’s cool,” I replied with a shudder, glad for the change in topic.
I didn’t want to think about what happened to me right now. It would only make my paranoia worse, and I was barely hanging on by a thread.
Tiffany broke the tension first. “Well, shit,” she muttered. “This turned emotional as hell.”
That earned a small laugh out of Giani, and a reluctant smile tugged at my mouth too. Then Giani slid her arm through mine naturally, like she’d done it a thousand times before.
“You not about to disappear on me again now that I found you,” she said. “Matter fact, your ass sitting with me the rest of the night.”
“Long as you don’t have me in the middle of all this,” I said, glancing around at the crowd.
