Waking Up Married To My Crush! novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Visiting Hours
Katie wakes in a hospital thinking she is 21 and finds her college crush at the bed saying he is her husband. His mother takes over and Katie puts her best friend on the visitor list herself, until Veda arrives and says Katie told her never to call.
I woke up with my mouth full of cotton and Colin Stanhope asleep in a chair beside my bed.
I knew exactly who he was.
Every girl in the entrepreneurship club knew who he was.
He was the alumnus who gave the talk in April, the one who walked to the podium and made two hundred people go quiet.
He was also the man who picked up my sketchbook off the quad that night and said, "Nice lines."
I had replayed those two words for a month.
Now he was slumped in a hospital chair with his tie pulled loose and a day of stubble on his jaw.
I lifted my hand to push my hair back and saw the ring.
It was a wide platinum band with a diamond I could have used to cut glass.
"That's not mine," I said out loud.
Colin opened his eyes at once.
They were gray, and they went straight to my face.
"Katie," he said. "Don't try to sit up."
"Why do you know my name?"
His thumb moved along his jaw.
"You're in the hospital," he said. "There was an accident two days ago. A truck ran a red light on Wacker."
"That doesn't explain you," I said.
"I'm your husband," he said.
I looked at him.
Then I did the only thing a twenty-one-year-old with a head injury and a crush could do.
I laughed.
It hurt my ribs, and I kept laughing until a nurse came in and the doctor came in behind her.
The doctor asked me my name, the date and who was president.
I got my name right.
I gave her an April date and a year that made her write something down.
"It's September," she said gently. "And it's four years later."
"No," I said.
"You have retrograde amnesia from the concussion. Your last four years are gone."
"I just graduated."
"You graduated four years ago, Mrs. Stanhope."
I put my hand over my mouth.
Four years.
I had a husband I had never kissed and a name I didn't know.
"Will it come back?" I asked.
"Maybe some," the doctor said. "Probably not most. I won't promise you either way."
Colin stood up when I started to shake.
He didn't touch me.
He just stood there with his hands open at his sides.
That was when the door opened and a woman in a cream suit walked in.
She had silver-blond hair, a strand of pearls and a face like a closed bank.
"Colin, you should have called me the moment she woke," she said.
She didn't look at me.
"This is my mother, Margaret," Colin said. "Katie, she's your mother-in-law."
"Kathleen," Margaret said, with a sharp, formal nod.
A younger woman slipped in behind her with a clipboard and a phone in a pink case.
"Your phone, Mrs. Stanhope," she said, and put it in my hand. "I've updated your calendar around the recovery. Everything is handled."
Her name tag said Lindsey, and her smile didn't reach her eyes.
I turned the phone over.
My lock screen was a photograph of a white rose.
I didn't own a single thing I liked.
"We'll take her home this afternoon," Margaret told the doctor. "I've arranged a private nurse and a quiet week. No visitors."
"No visitors?" I said.
"You need rest, Kathleen."
"I need my best friend."
Margaret finally looked at me.
Her eyes were pale blue, and they went over me.
"Family only. We've kept the list short."
"Then add Veda Quigley," I said.
Lindsey's pen stopped.
"I don't think Veda is on the list," she said. "It's been some time."
"Then put her on it."
I turned to the nurse.
"Write down Veda Quigley. She's my family. If she comes, you let her in."
The nurse looked at Margaret.
I said, "Look at me, not her."
The nurse wrote it down.
Margaret's mouth went flat.
Colin made a small sound that might have been a laugh, and he covered it with his hand.
"Katie," he said. "My mother is only trying to help."
"I know," I said. "I'm not going home in a wheelchair she picks out, either."
"We'll discuss it in the car," Margaret said.
"We'll discuss it in the hall, when I can walk," I said.
The doctor, to her credit, looked at the ceiling.
I stayed in bed with my chin up and my new husband staring at me.
For the first time in my life, I didn't care who was watching.
Forty minutes later the door opened again.
A woman in clay-streaked overalls stood there with a grocery bag in her arms and her short black hair in her eyes.
Veda.
I had last seen her four months ago, laughing on a dorm couch with a slice of pizza in her hand.
"Veda," I said, and I started to cry.
She did not put down the bag.
She did not come any closer.
"I got a call from a nurse," she said. "She said you asked for me."
"I did. I woke up and I didn't know anything, and I thought of you first."
Veda looked at Colin.
Then she looked at me, and her face was hard in a way I had never seen it.
"You told me never to call again," she said. "Fourteen months ago."
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