Page 94

George made a face. “Weird, but also not the same thing.”
“No,” she admitted, the shakiness still with her. “But he looked so guilty when he said it. I don’t know why he feels that way if he didn’t cause the accident.”
George considered that before laying a gentle hand on her arm. “Shit, Emma, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this is too big. You need to talk to him. Get the whole story.”
Emma closed her eyes. “I know. It’s just hard, you know.”
“Why? I mean, why beyond the obvious?”
Slumping, Emma tried to find the right words. “The past isn’t just gone for me. It’s obliterated.”
Flopping back on the cushions, she twisted to face her. “My mom has this little room in her new house. It’s full of my old books, school papers, and all the prizes I earned in school. Before I left,she made me go through it all—the report cards, prizes, and letters of recommendation. I even read the copies I made of my college application essays.”
George’s eyes were soft and sympathetic. “And it was like someone else wrote them.”
She nodded. “There were so many accolades. Boxes and boxes of them, representing an insane number of man-hours. Verdant Falls was a small pond but I was a big-ass whale in it. But none ofherwork was familiar.”
“Heris you,” George insisted. “You were a badass. And you’re still one.”
If only that were true.
“Not anymore,” she said, tired of putting a brave face on things. “I used to want to work on Wall Street. That ambition defined my life. I was in every club and extracurricular activity that would beef up my college applications so I could get into a top-tier school. I busted my ass for scholarships so I could afford it.”
“And now you’re a barista,” George finished.
“Oh. I’m the last person to knock a job in the service industry. I know exactly how hard it is and how terrible people can be to you when you wear a name tag every day.”
She smiled weakly. “It’s more about not recognizing that girl from before, the driven one that thought math was her love language and treated everything like a competition. She may as well be an alien. But everyone who knew me before expectsher.”
She caught Georgia’s look of consternation and cut her off when the other woman opened her mouth to protest.
“Oh, they always pretended they didn’t. The counselors and the psychiatrists in the hospital had coached them on what to say. They parroted the same phrases, pretending to want nothing from me. But I knew better.”
The couch and garage ceased to exist, her memory supplying the image of a series of sterile white hospital rooms.
“Every single person who came to see me in the hospital would look at me with this unspoken expectation. In the back of their mind, each one of them thought thattheywould be the one to unlock mymemories, to be the person I remembered. In their unspoken fantasies, they would kick open the floodgates and bring it all back for me. And when that didn’t happen, they inevitably left disappointed. Most stopped coming back after one or two visits.”
Georgia sobbed unexpectedly.
“I’m sorry,” she cried, waving her hands at her teary eyes as if she could fan the moisture away. “But that is so messed up.”
Hell, she shouldn’t have been so honest. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
Emma was weeping by this point, too. This was a pity party she shouldn’t have invited anyone else to.
“I guess Rainer didn’t know Garrett and I had something before the accident,” Emma decided. “Or he would have told you.”
Georgia blinked as if waking up. “If he does know, I’m going to strangle him.”
“That would be a bad way to kick off your marriage.” Emma laughed before frowning. “Wait, why aren’t you on your honeymoon?”
George brightened. “I had an unexpected commission. A spectacular 1960 Shelby Cobra came in.”
She laughed suddenly. “Rainer is salivating over it and plans on making the owner an offer. He didn’t want me to feel rushed with such a fine specimen, so we decided to give ourselves a couple of extra days at home before leaving. We’re supposed to fly out on Friday. But we won’t go if you need me here.”
Emma felt awful. “No, you have to go on your honeymoon.”
The thought that her drama was derailing her new friend’s plans shook her. “I’m making too much of this.”