Page 15

For a moment, it was like everything faded, and it was only the two of them.

“So this is going to sound like a really strange and intrusive question,” Cat said, standing up. She reached over to put her hand on Dallas’s arm, and he would normally have said that he hated things like that. That he wanted nothing to do with expressions of emotion, even if it was meant to be comforting.

Maybe especially if it was meant to be comforting.

But this had been a very strange twelve hours or so. He didn’t think he was coping with it well. And since he was doing his very best not to unleash his actual feelings on Ruthie right now, Cat’s hand on his arm did a lot of heavy lifting.

He dropped his head so Ruthie couldn’t see his face. Since he had no idea if he could control it.

“I don’t think strange and intrusive questions sound like they could be any weirder than what’s already happening,” Ruthie said after a moment, sounding uncertain.

But also like maybe she was hoping that there could be a laugh here somewhere. Or that whatever Cat was about to say would make sense of this.

Hell, Dallas did too.

“I’m so sorry that your grandmother died,” Cat said quietly. “I’m just wondering if, by any chance, you might have had some kind of head injury recently?”

Dallas shot her a look, but Cat ignored him. So he looked back at Ruthie instead.

Ruthie, who was now inching back a bit, staring at both of them with a look on her face that was pretty close to horror.

“How could you possibly know that?” she asked, but her voice sounded… thin.

“I just started nursing school this semester,” Cat told her, matter-of-factly, as if focusing on rural care at Montana State in Bozeman meant she was also an amnesia diagnostician, but Dallas found himself nodding anyway. “And I’ve been reading about different kinds of amnesia. That’s why I asked.”

“Not that I can think of why you would want…” Ruthie shook her head, visibly gathering herself. “Yes. My grandmother and I were in a car accident six months ago. We were T-boned by a truck that ran right through a stop sign. My grandmother got the brunt of it, went into the hospital, and never recovered. I was basically fine.”

Dallas was holding his breath. Cat, who Dallas had never thought of as being particularly sympathetic—at least to him—demonstrated her stellar bedside manner there and then. She made a low, sympathetic sort of noise, and then just waited.

Ruthie swallowed. “I did hit my head pretty hard,” she admitted after a moment. “That’s what the doctor said. It seems as if I don’t have…entirely accurate memories anymore.”

“We got that part,” Cat said, gently. “That’s why I thought to ask.”

At that, Ruthie blew out a breath and Dallas would bet, if she took those oversize mittens off, that he’d see her hands were curled into fists. Something vulnerable moved over her face, but she stood straighter.

“I’m guessing, by all the weird things that have happened since I got here, that I should know who you people are,” Ruthie said after a moment, looking at Dallas as she said it. “I really…didn’t consider that would be a possibility. I don’t know why I would know anybody in Montana. I’ve never left Georgia.”

Cat looked up at Dallas, who found himself staring back at her, stricken. Because Ruthie had been in an accident. T-boned by a truck, which he could see too clearly in his head and it made his stomach hurt. An accident so bad that it had killed Deanna Rae, and had done a number on Ruthie herself.

He hated it.

“You do know us,” Cat told her, and she squeezed Dallas’s arm then. “Especially him.”

Ruthie bit her bottom lip, and nodded. “Okay.” She blew out another breath, like she was a little more panicky than she was letting on. Then she met Dallas’s gaze, and kept it steady, because she had always been the brave one. “How do we know each other?”

What a simple, easy, and incredibly loaded fucking question.

“I don’t know a whole lot about amnesia,” Dallas said, gruffly, and ran a hand over his face like that would make this easier. It didn’t. “Mostly, what I do know is from movies and television shows, and so it’s probably bullshit. But I was under the distinct impression that you don’t go around telling people with amnesia things that they can’t remember. You’re supposed to let them remember on their own.”

“That’s not very helpful at all.” Ruthie said that with a flash of the temper he certainly remembered she had in her. “This is like my cousins. I was constantly standing around in rooms with people who knew things I didn’t, and no one would tell me what they were.”

Her cousins. Dallas let out a short laugh. “In the case of your cousins, they’re grifters and con men who gave you and your grandmother a hard time, all the time, because they thought she should have funded their shenanigans. Which she never had any intention of doing.”

It was only when Cat blinked at him that he thought that might have been a little…intense for the situation.

Not that it was untrue.

Ruthie’s hazel eyes looked bluer than usual, then. “I did wonder,” she said. But she pressed her lips together. “And to be honest, I don’t care. I didn’t want to be there anymore, whether they were paragons of virtue or the literal worst.”