Waking Up Married To My Crush! novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Fourteen Months

At the townhouse Katie finds a closet of beige clothes with Lindsey's tags and cancels the week Lindsey planned. Colin tells her he has slept across the hall for fourteen months, the same fourteen months Veda named.

"What did I say to you?" I asked.

"Ask him," Veda said, and she tipped her chin at Colin.

Colin kept his eyes on the floor.

"I don't remember anything after April," I said. "Veda, please."

Her face moved for half a second, the way it used to when I cried in the library.

Then she set the grocery bag on the end of my bed.

"There's a mug in there," she said. "I made it for your graduation. You never picked it up."

"That was four months ago for me."

"That was four years ago for me."

She wrote a number on the back of my hospital menu and dropped the pen on the blanket.

"I'm here because a nurse said you asked for me," she said. "That's all this is."

"Okay."

"Don't say okay like that. Like nothing happened."

She walked out, and I held the mug against my chest until the nurse took my blood pressure.

I walked out of the hospital on my own two feet at four o'clock.

Margaret had already put a wheelchair at the curb, and I walked past it.

Colin held the car door for me, and his hand hovered near my elbow without touching it.

"You can lean on me," he said.

"I know," I said, and I did, a little, just to see what it felt like.

He smelled like cedar and coffee.

My heart did something stupid.

Margaret rode in the front seat and didn't speak once.

The house was a limestone townhouse on the Gold Coast, four floors and a brass door knocker shaped like a lion.

I stood in the front hall and said, "This is where I live?"

"This floor," Colin said. "My mother's wing is upstairs."

"We live under your mother."

"Yes."

"Okay," I said, and heard Veda's voice in my head, and didn't say it a second time.

A woman was waiting in the kitchen with a tablet.

It was Lindsey, and she had beaten us there.

A printed schedule was stuck to the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like a pear.

TUESDAY: Foundation luncheon, 12:00. Navy dress. Do not discuss the accident.

WEDNESDAY: Fitting, 10:00. Style consultant at 2:00.

THURSDAY: Garden club tea. Mrs. Stanhope hosts.

FRIDAY: Rest.

I read it twice.

"Who wrote this?" I said.

"I did," Lindsey said. "Margaret asked me to protect your recovery."

"Who is in charge of my recovery?"

"The doctor, Margaret and I."

"And me?"

Lindsey's smile held steady.

"Of course," she said. "You'll sign off on anything you like."

I pulled the schedule off the fridge, folded it in half and handed it back.

"I'm not going to a luncheon. I don't know these people."

"They know you," Lindsey said.

"Then they'll understand."

Colin made that small sound again behind me.

It was nearly a laugh.

Lindsey looked at him, and he looked at the pear magnet.

I went to find my room.

It was at the end of the hall, a big white bedroom with pale curtains and a bed made so smooth it looked unused.

There were no photographs.

There was no laundry on the chair, no book on the nightstand and no sketchbook anywhere.

I opened the closet.

Sixty hangers, and every one of them held beige, cream, ivory or navy.

A small paper tag was pinned to each sleeve in Lindsey's neat hand.

LUNCHEON. TEA. CHURCH. DONOR DINNER.

On the last hanger, in the same writing, it said APPROVED BY M.S.

I stood there holding a cream sweater set that was the exact shape of a woman who never spoke.

"Which of these is mine?" I said.

"All of them," Colin said from the door. "You wore them."

"Did I pick them?"

He opened his mouth and shut it.

His thumb moved along his jaw.

"No," he said.

I laughed, which was becoming a habit.

Then I took a pair of scissors from the desk and cut every tag off every sleeve.

It took a while.

He leaned on the door frame and let me.

When I was done I had a pile of paper on the carpet, and he said, "I should show you where your things are."

He carried my hospital bag the whole length of the hall.

At the room across from mine he stopped and set it down.

"This one's mine," he said.

I looked at the bed through the open door, and at the rumpled gray sheets, and at the book face down on the pillow.

"You sleep in there?"

"Yes."

"Why aren't we in the same room?"

He took a breath.

"I work late," he said. "I didn't want to wake you."

"For how long?"

"A while."

"Colin."

"Fourteen months," he said.

The hallway got very quiet.

Veda had said fourteen months too.

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