My Ex-Fiancé's Memory Game novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Text

Carter's mother brings him to Hazel's stoop, where he fakes a faint for the neighbors and whispers that she can't prove anything.

I didn't answer the text.

Sam had read it over my shoulder in the diner and said:

"Screenshot."

So I took a screenshot and sent it to Polly and to Sam.

Then I went home and lay awake on top of the covers until the birds started.

At eleven on Saturday morning somebody leaned on my doorbell.

Not a ring. A lean. Long and steady.

I knew it was his mother before I opened the door.

She was on my top step in white slacks and a pale blue sweater set, pearls before noon on a Saturday.

Carter stood one step down, holding the iron railing.

"Hazel," his mother said. "We need to talk. Inside."

"No."

She blinked.

In two years I had never said no to her.

Not about the club, not about the band, not about the shade of white my dress was allowed to be.

"Excuse me?"

"You can talk from there," I said. "I can hear you fine."

Across the street, the old woman who sweeps her steps every morning stopped sweeping.

She's eighty and she's lived on our block since before it had parking signs. She leaned on her broom with great interest.

Next door, the young dad who jogs with a stroller came out with his recycling and didn't go back in.

Carter's mother lowered her voice, which didn't help.

"Do you have any idea what you did to him last night? In front of his friends? At our club?"

"I have a very good idea."

"He's a trauma patient, Hazel. You of all people. You know what stress does to a head injury. He came home and he couldn't stop shaking."

I looked at Carter.

He was looking at the bricks.

"And now he's having these flashes," she went on. "He woke up this morning and said your name. He asked for you. Do you understand what that means? His memory is coming back, and you're standing in a doorway being cruel."

"His memory came back at ten forty-one last night," I said.

She frowned.

"He texted me," I said. "You should see it."

I held out my phone.

She didn't want to take it.

She took it anyway, because the neighbors were watching.

She read it.

I watched her read it twice.

"Hazy," she said, out loud, before she could stop herself.

That was what she'd called me at the engagement party. She'd thought it was darling.

Carter made a soft noise.

His hand slipped off the railing.

Then his knees went, and he folded down onto my front steps.

His head knocked once against the bottom brick.

His mother screamed.

The stroller dad dropped his recycling bin.

The old woman came halfway across the street with her broom.

"Call an ambulance!" Carter's mother shouted at nobody. "Hazel, do something, you're a doctor!"

"I'm a psychologist," I said.

But I went down the steps.

I knelt on the bricks beside him in my bare feet and put two fingers on the inside of his wrist.

His pulse was strong and slow.

His breathing was even.

His eyelids weren't fluttering. They were squeezed. People who are actually out don't squeeze.

"He's fine," I said.

"He is not fine! Look at him!"

"His pulse is sixty-two. He's breathing better than you are."

Carter's mother got down on the step above him, and her white slacks went gray at the knees, and I could tell she noticed.

"This is exactly what the doctor warned us about," she said to the street. "Any mention of the wedding. Any shock. And she shoves a phone in my face."

"I didn't mention the wedding," I said. "I showed you a text he sent me. With a name nobody's used since June."

"Someone must have told him that name."

"Who?"

"I don't know! Tripp. One of his friends. People talk to him, Hazel. People are trying to help him remember."

"Then ask Tripp why he'd tell Carter to text me at eleven at night and say I misheard."

That shut her up.

"Misheard what?" she said.

I didn't answer that.

Sam had been clear. The recording stays in your pocket until it's worth something.

I took my phone back out of her hand.

The stroller dad had picked up his cans. He was holding one like he might throw it.

"You want me to call somebody?" he asked me, not her.

"I'm okay," I said. "Thank you."

Carter's mother stood up. She brushed at her knees.

"I'm going to get the car," she said. "I'm going to pull it up to the curb, and we're going to take him to Bryn Mawr Hospital. And then I'm going to call your father."

"Please do," I said. "He's dying to talk to you."

She went down the block without looking back.

The old woman went back to her side of the street, slowly, still holding the broom.

That left me kneeling on my own front step beside the man I'd almost married.

He lay with his cheek on the warm brick and his hands loose.

I leaned down to check the bump on his head, because the knock had been real.

Carter opened one eye.

Just one. Brown, clear, completely awake.

He looked straight up at me.

"You can't prove anything, Hazy," he whispered.

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