Page 11 of Midnight Between Us (The Timberbridge Brothers #4)

Chapter Eight

Keir

There’s a hum in the air that doesn’t belong to the machines.

I’ve been staring at the same crack in the ceiling for what feels like forever.

It branches off in three directions, cutting through cheap paint and ceiling tile like a road map to nowhere.

I’ve counted the grooves so many times I’ve started assigning them personalities.

Line A’s the pessimist. Line B wants out. Line C doesn’t know what it wants.

It’s a good distraction from the rest of it.

From the sterile scent of antiseptic trying—and failing—to cover something softer.

Faint, familiar. Shampoo, maybe. Hers? Someone else’s soap?

It lingers on the sheets like a question no one’s answered, and for a moment, I wish it weren’t there at all.

Because if I can’t remember who she is, what’s the point of missing her?

The skin on my left thigh itches. Not a light itch—an impossible, buried-alive kind of itch. The kind that lives beneath the surface, driving you out of your mind because your body refuses to cooperate.

My right hand barely flexes—the gauze tugs when I try, stiff and unforgiving. My shoulders ache like I’ve been stapled to this bed, forgotten here. My gown clings to me, damp with stale sweat. There’s a dull, growing pressure along my hip, like I lost a fight with something I don’t remember.

My mouth tastes like cheap cotton and something worse—regret, maybe.

I want water. Real water. Not the ice chips they keep spooning into my mouth as if I should be grateful.

I want answers. I want the scraping behind my ribs to stop every time I think about her voice—the way it cracked when she told me no, she didn’t know me.

Like maybe she meant it a little less than she wanted to.

But I don’t ask for anything.

One thing I know is that silence is easier than disappointment—I just don’t know how I learned that.

The door creaks open.

This time, it’s not her .

It’s a man, probably in his forties. Straight-backed and confident, as doctors typically are when they’re not the ones bleeding. He holds a tablet in his hand. Clad in a white coat with a stethoscope, he exudes a practiced calm that indicates he knows exactly how this conversation should proceed.

“Good afternoon,” he says, flipping through notes. “I’m Dr. Aldridge, the neurosurgeon. I’m here to run a few cognitive assessments. Check on your memory.”

I don’t correct him. Not about the time of day—because, for all I know, it’s seven in the fucking morning. Not about my memory either. That part feels more shattered than my body, and I’m not sure which one I’m supposed to be scared of.

He gives me a small smile like I’m a riddle he’s solved before. “Let’s start simple. Do you know what year it is?”

I pause. My mind turns over and finds . . . well, nothing.

“No.”

“Current president?”

I blink. President . . . I feel like I should know this, but the only thing that comes to mind is something truly stupid, and I just say it: “President Dwayne Elizondo Camacho?”

His mouth twitches, amused. “Close. But not quite.”

He scribbles something on the chart. Probably something like: “patient disoriented but sarcastic as fuck.”

“Do you remember the accident?”

I draw in a shallow breath. “No.”

“What about anything before the crash?”

Was there a crash? Images come to me—hazy and wrong. The chill of air I didn’t breathe. The crush of fog that felt like skin. Water, maybe. Not drowning. Just . . . cold.

“Fog. Water. Cold,” I mumble.

He nods. Jots it down. “That’s common. Trauma doesn’t always erase memory—it just fractures it. You might remember pieces. Faces. Sounds. Bits of a song or a smell.”

“I remembered someone,” I say, surprising even myself.

He glances up. Eyes sharper now.

“I don’t know her name,” I continue. Should I tell him that she looked like the doctor who was earlier in the room? I choose not to and add, “But she was there. Not during the accident. Before or maybe after. Somewhere colder than this room. She begged me not to leave.”

A beat passes. He doesn’t say anything.

I sigh and add, “I could feel her presence.”

Dr. Aldridge stills. The look in his eyes softens—not pity, just interest mixed with something like caution.

“You’re describing what we call a coma dream,” he says. “It’s not unusual in TBI recovery. The brain tries to create order out of static—stories, people, places. It’s its way of holding on.”

“She felt real,” I insist. “Maybe she was. At some point.”

He clicks his pen. “Let’s try a tracking test. Follow the pen with your eyes.”

I do, so slowly and half-focused. My vision drifts right before it snaps back, as if my brain knows what’s expected and yet still refuses to deliver.

He lifts a reflex tool and taps my knee.

My leg jerks, but not with urgency. Like it’s remembering how to be a leg in real-time.

“Sluggish,” he mutters. “Expected.”

I want to ask when that ends—when I stop being a case study or a file someone reopens too late. But I don’t say anything, because the only question I really want to ask is: Where the fuck is she?

And why her absence hurts more than the wreck ever did.

He shines a light into my eyes. Something burns behind them—not exactly pain. A flicker. A pulse. A memory trying to claw its way back.

Then his pen slips from his hand.

It hits the floor with a crack—louder than it should be. The sound splits the air like a starting gun, like a bell, like the moment before something breaks.

And suddenly, it’s not the clinic anymore.

It begins with the light of late afternoon. The tired, golden haze that filters through old stained glass and bathes everything in something that almost feels holy. The air smells like wood polish, mildew, and something quieter. Something that’s been waiting.

I’m in a church.

It’s more like a small, worn-down chapel.

The hymnals are torn at the corners. The pew cushions are faded and uneven, and the wood groaning under the slightest shift in weight.

People don’t stay here because it’s beautiful—they stay because it’s familiar.

Because it’s held too many confessions, too many promises.

Because after a while, leaving feels harder than staying.

She’s already sitting beside me when the scene pulls into focus. Her hands are tucked under her thighs as if she doesn’t trust them not to fidget. Her knees knock against mine, and she doesn’t apologize.

It’s her . Younger. Teenager, maybe. Her auburn hair is down, curls damp like she just stepped out of the river.

She’s wearing a flannel shirt that’s too big—it might be mine.

There’s a bruise on her arm that she’s trying to hide beneath the sleeve, and the frayed hem of her shorts looks like she cut them herself.

She doesn’t look at me.

Just stares straight ahead at the altar like she’s waiting for lightning.

I want to ask if she’s okay. What we’re doing here. Why she looks like she’s trying to disappear without moving.

But what comes out is, “You stole my shirt again.”

Her lips twitch. Not a smile. Not quite. “It was in your truck.”

“Still mine.”

She shrugs. “Maybe you should stop leaving your stuff where people who love you can find it.”

The word lands hard on my chest—my soul.

Love.

I ignore it. She doesn’t look at me after she said it.

We both pretend we didn’t hear it. She’s not supposed to love me.

We’re friends—just friends. Sure, there are some benefits between us because she gets pissed if I kiss someone else.

It’s as if she has some fucking ownership over me.

Still, we’re just friends and nothing else.

There can’t be anything else between us.

I’ve learned the hard way that loving people only turns you into someone you don’t recognize. You break them, or they break you, and neither version is worth surviving. I’d never do that to her. At least, I thought I wouldn’t.

A part of me knows it’s okay because I’m leaving soon. And she’ll be fine. She always is. After all, I’ve taught her to defend herself, to be strong . . . to be cold because there’s no worth in being nice or loving anyone.

“You came here with your mom once,” I say. “She made you kneel and ask for a miracle. Then lit a cigarette on the front steps.”

She huffs. Dry. Almost a laugh. “Yeah. She said Jesus was the only man who never disappointed her.”

I scoff. “She told my mom she was allergic to virtue at a PTO meeting.”

“That sounds about right.”

Silence settles once more. The warm, sharp kind that fills a room just before something is said that can’t be taken back.

“You ever think about leaving?” I ask.

She looks at me then.

Really looks.

And the whole church seems to pause with her. Even the dust remains still. The light freezes where it touches her skin.

“Would you take me with you when you do?” she asks. Her voice is small. Careful. Like she already knows the answer and that it’s going to split her open.

I want to say yes.

I want to tell her I already packed space for her beside me. That I couldn’t picture leaving without her.

But I don’t.

Because I know how this end.

I leave without a warning or even a goodbye. I vanish, and she’s left with the silence I never explained. The promise I never made, but she felt anyway.

She must hear it in my stillness.

Her jaw tightens. She looks away.

The light in the room starts to shift. The moment begins to fray at the edges.

She stands. Wipes her hands down the front of my stolen shirt like it suddenly feels wrong on her skin. “For once, I wanted you to say yes, even if it was a lie.” She doesn’t cry. She just walks.

Her footsteps echo, too loud for a place this small.

I try to call her name. “Simone.”

But the church is collapsing now. The walls stretch. The floor shifts. The ceiling spins.

She’s halfway down the aisle, then farther. Her figure fades, swallowed by something I can’t stop.

I try to follow. Try to run. But nothing moves.

I try to call out, to make her name rise in the space between us.

But my voice is gone.

She disappears into the light, and I’m left with what she always hated most—stillness.

Just dust in the air. Heat on my skin. And the sting of everything I never said.

“Are you okay?”

The voice pulls me back. It’s not hers. The pews vanish. The light fades. And I’m back—sweat-soaked, breath shallow, wishing I could remain in a place that never existed.

Dr. Aldridge is closer now, eyes narrowing with quiet concern. My chest is still heaving, and my lungs are slow to remember how to breathe here. I blink. It takes too long to remember where I am.

“Yeah,” I rasp. “Still here.”

His brow creases. “What just happened? You were out for a couple of minutes.”

“I saw her again.” I gasp, trying to recover my breath, it’s as if I just ran fast so the church wouldn’t swallow me as it was falling apart.

He doesn’t write that down. Just nods. Thoughtful. Careful. Like if he moves too fast, I’ll vanish again.

“Can you tell me more?”

I let the words fall out, thick and low. “A church. A confession without the God part. She knew I’d leave. I called her name, but she wouldn’t stop. The place began to fall apart.”

“Her name?”

I close my eyes. It rises without hesitation. “Simone.”

I know I didn’t hear it recently. No one said it to me. It didn’t come from a nurse or a note or a whisper near my bed. It came from me—from somewhere that still remembers what mattered.

Dr. Aldridge rises to his feet, something softer crossing his face. “That’s a good sign. Memory retrieval often begins with emotional links. A voice. A flash of a moment. It’s how the rest starts to come back.”

I nod faintly. Not because I fully understand but because I need to believe him.

“Try to rest,” he says gently. “This is progress. I’ll let your attending know you’re stable enough to continue recovery from home.”

My brain snags on the word home. What home? I don’t remember having one. Is he talking about here? Her?

The words barely land before he turns to leave. The door clicks softly behind him. I stare back up at the ceiling. Same cracks. Same pale cross above the bed.

But something feels different now.

My body still aches. My memory’s a tangle of smoke and fractured images.

But her name . . . that’s real.

And for the first time since waking up, it feels like something in this room actually belongs to me.