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Jo

I n the small bathroom half-hidden behind one of the walls of her office, Jo splashed some cold water on her face. It did nothing to soothe her embarrassment. Long poles. What the hell had she been thinking?

Last time I go for an engineering analogy .

Though she knew he’d already left the building, she could still hear Hugo Morant’s deep, gravelly voice in her mind—the light hitch in his breathing that told her he’d picked up on the unfortunate reference.

She dried her face carefully, placing the towel back on the rack next to the sink. The small, half-hidden bathroom had been one of the selling points of the set-up for her. There was another bathroom outside, for patients and for Madame Lagarde to use, but this one was just hers. She turned left, instinctively counting the three steps back into her office.

Mostly, she’d gotten used to being blind—or legally blind, anyway, since she could sometimes see vague shadows ahead, at other times that difference between light and dark, if she was paying attention right when the change happened.

At first, after the accident—Hugo Morant had referred to what happened to him as an accident, too, though both were as far removed from accidental as they could be. There was nothing accidental about being run off the road in a car-crash that killed your sister, and nothing accidental about being shot in the back and left for dead. But Jo understood. It was hard to comprehend, let alone speak, about the unspeakable. Those things human beings did to one another that psychologists had been trying to understand since the advent of psychology. So yes, she understood. The word accident helped compartmentalize what had happened—and made it possible to speak about it. She wasn’t going to take that away from him. But she did need him to understand that the fact that he was affected by such horror—and she’d read the files, she knew that he’d lain there, bleeding, paralyzed from the waist down, not knowing where their attacker was, not knowing if he or the woman he was trying to protect were going to be run over—just proved he was human. A decent human being.

After her accident , Jo had thought of only two things. Her sister, and her eyesight. She’d wished her sister were still alive, and she’d wished for her eyesight to come back. Two impossible wishes, neither of which could be granted. And there was nothing wrong with dreaming, nothing wrong with hoping, but wishes that could never come true could be devastating in their own right.

It was only once she was able to accept that her eyesight—just like her sister—wasn’t coming back, that Jo had been able to heal. She wished that for Hugo Morant as well. She’d had six years to come to terms with it, though, and he’d only had three short months.

And she had—mostly—come to terms with being blind. Very rarely, she wished she could see, usually when she was at a museum, or at an airport. Traveling was a lot more stressful than it used to be. In her day-to-day life, she rarely thought about it. But today, when Hugo Morant had walked into the room, she’d wished for her eyesight back. There was something about his presence, something about that deep, controlled voice, that had affected her greatly. And she was smart enough to recognize this wasn’t just about being interested in him as a patient. No, she was interested in him as a man , and this simply didn’t happen to her.

She’d just made it to her desk when a sharp knock sounded. Madame Lagarde always knocked exactly the same—two sharp knocks, just to get her attention. It wasn’t something they’d ever discussed, just something the woman did naturally, and Jo appreciated it. She appreciated everything about the ultra-efficient older woman. Hiring her had been one of her better decisions. When she left France—if she ever left France—she was going to hate leaving her behind.

“Dr. Marsh.” Jo hadn’t been able to get the receptionist to call her by her first name—or what went as her first name these days—so they were both still Madaming each other all the time. But it was still early days. Jo had only been in France for a few months. We’ll get there, eventually . “I was able to fit Mr. Morant in tomorrow at three p.m.”

“That’s great, thank you Madame Lagarde.” Jo paused for an instant. There was a coldness in the woman’s tone that wasn’t usual, even for her. “You don’t like him.”

“It’s not my place to like or dislike him,” her receptionist said. Again, that cold, brittle tone. “But he’s that kind of young, good-looking man that I do not trust. And he was three minutes late to his appointment.”

Jo refrained from laughing. Three minutes was a long time in Madame Lagarde’s books. Even Jo had found herself getting better at time management, just to keep her receptionist happy.

“What does he look like?” she asked, knowing it wasn’t professional interest that drove her, but unable to help herself.

“Tall and big. I worried for the chair outside when he sat down.” The chair was the least of Jo’s concerns. “Short, dark hair. A good haircut for a man,” she continued, approvingly. “Dark, soulful eyes.” Now she sounded almost poetic. “But too handsome. I never trust handsome men. My husband was extremely handsome. Did I tell you how he died? In bed with a mistress I didn’t know existed. But I don’t like talking about that.”

Goodness . That went a long way towards explaining the woman’s view of the world. Better get the conversation back on track. “Did Mr. Morant look like he’d suffered any injury recently?”

“An injury? No. He looked strong as an ox.”

Jo thought back to the session, once again wishing she could see. There had been times when his breath had sounded like he was in pain. Her hearing was sensitive. But stress could also cause something similar.

Jo rubbed her eyes tiredly. “Would you like me to find your sunglasses?” Madame Lagarde was nothing if not observant. She’d clearly noticed that Jo often reached for her sunglasses when it was bright outside. Not doing so often resulted in a headache that took her days to get rid of.

Jo thanked her and waited until her receptionist came back with the glasses. It was one of the unfortunate side-effects of a traumatic brain injury like the one she’d suffered, and one she’d learned to deal with. Sometimes, she wished it was her eyes that didn’t work. Maybe then she wouldn’t be prone to such debilitating headaches. But her eyes worked just fine. Her blindness, known as TBI-related blindness or cortical blindness, resulted from her brain’s inability to interpret what her eyes saw, rather than any problem with the eyes themselves. In her ophthalmologist’s own words, she had the healthiest eyes of any blind person he’d ever seen. Jo sniggered to herself. One had to be able to laugh about these things.

Once her receptionist was gone, Jo flipped open her tablet and turned on her computer, syncing the two together. She used Google Lens to convert her hand-written notes into digital text, and then another app, KNFB Reader, to read the text aloud to her. She listened to her notes twice, annotating her questions and thoughts for tomorrow’s session.

Mr. Morant was an interesting patient. Clearly reluctant to be here, but not hostile. At the end, when he’d asked if she could help him, he’d sounded almost … hopeful. Jo made a further note. She could empathize with his despair. After her accident, she’d woken up in a dark world. Literally dark, because her eyesight was gone, but also figuratively dark, because she’d lost something even more precious—her little sister. It had always annoyed Becca to no end when Jo referred to her as her little sister, since the two were only a year and a half apart. But that’s how Jo had always thought of Becca—hers to love and protect. And she’d tried, all the way to the end. Until a man called Bartholomew Horns had crossed Becca’s path.

A sudden bout of homesickness struck Jo as she thought of her parents. There was so much she was keeping bottled in. If she were still home, back in Seattle, she might have told one of her colleagues—who was also a close friend—that she needed a friendly ear. But here … she’d only arrived in Chamonix four months ago. Her closest friend was probably Madame Lagarde, and that was saying something.

But that was precisely why she’d chosen Chamonix. Because she had no connection to the place. She’d seen an ad once, many years earlier, back when she could still see, and the image of the rustic Alpine town, with the shadow of Mont Blanc looming majestically behind, had stuck with her. It was a postcard her mind had returned to time and time again, and she’d thought some day she might travel to see it. But she’d never had any intention of leaving Seattle. That’s where her parents had always lived, where she and her sister had been born and gone to school. Where Jo had always figured she and Becca would live once they settled down and had their own kids.

But that was not to be. In Jo’s family, there was a before Horns and an after Horns . Horns had sunk them all into a pit of despair from which Jo’s parents were only just emerging. As she thought of Bartholomew Horns, the homesickness morphed into something else, a sour feeling in the pit of her stomach. She took a deep breath, uncertain for a moment whether she’d keep her breakfast, and waited for the roiling to stop.