Chapter 22: Starting Over

Colin did not answer her.

He took his hand off the back of my chair, stepped around the table and walked out of his mother's dining room beside me.

Behind us, no one rang the bell.

The neurologist's office on Monday smelled like carpet cleaner and warm plastic.

Colin drove me, and he waited in the hall with a magazine he never turned a page of.

The doctor put the scans on the light box and tapped a gray corner of the brain.

"Here is the injury, and here is the swelling, which is gone," she said. "You've healed well."

"And the memory?"

"I'll be honest with you, Mrs. Stanhope."

"Katie."

"Katie. The first weeks are the window, and you've had them. You're getting flashes. The one you told me about, the stairs, is real."

"But the rest?"

"Most of those four years won't come back," she said. "A few more pieces, maybe. Not the whole."

I looked at the scan, at the little gray corner where Colin's wedding day should have been.

I waited to feel something fall.

What came instead was a clear, flat quiet.

"So what I have is now," I said.

"What you have is now, and whatever you build from it."

I thanked her and shook her hand, and I walked out into the hall.

Colin stood up too fast and dropped the magazine.

"Well?" he said.

"It's not coming back."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be," I said. "I've figured something out."

"What?"

"I don't want her back."

His eyes went wide and then careful.

"The woman who wrote that petition was right to leave you," I said. "She had four years of reasons. I only have seven weeks."

"Okay."

"So I'm starting over. I'm going to court you."

He stared.

"I'm going to take you on a date. A real one, with a toothbrush," I said.

"Where do you go that your mother doesn't know about?"

A slow smile spread over his face.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Waking Up Married To My Crush! from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.