1. Hadley
1
HADLEY
I cringed as my phone vibrated in my purse. Again.
The judge banged the gavel, making me recoil even more. He raised one imperious, silver eyebrow. “Mrs. Jenkins, do you need to get that?” he asked. He glared at me from across the big desk behind which he sat. My phone made another plaintive noise. The vibration from it was barely detectable. But, of course, the judge had heard it. He’d heard it every one of the ten times it had gone off in the past five minutes.
“No, your honor,” I said. The defendant next to me fidgeted in her seat. “I’m sorry,” I mouthed at her.
“Let’s take a break while Mrs. Jenkins takes that phone call. Then we can all stop being distracted by her phone going off repeatedly.” Bang! went the gavel again.
I let out a breath. I’d had no less than ten calls in the last five minutes. That was a record. I scuttled out of the courtroom as fast as my heels could take me, dashed into the ladies’ room, pulled my phone out of my pocket, and saw that unknown caller who had tried repeatedly.
Just as I stared down at it, it rang again. I lifted it to my ear. “Hello,” I said quietly, pretty sure that someone wanting to sell me an extended car warranty wouldn’t have tried me ten times.
“Hadley, is that you?” a voice said. I knew that voice. I froze.
“Jace,” I replied. Then I cleared my throat. “Jason,” I said more formally, “what do you want?”
“Oh, my God,” he whispered. “I’m so glad I found you. Can you come and get me?”
My heart stuttered. It actually stopped beating for a second. “What?” I whisper-hissed.
“I need you to come and get me.” He let out a breath.
“Why?” I replied, still baffled that he’d called me, and I was even more confused by what he was saying. Jace and I hadn’t talked in over a year. And when we had spoken before, it never went well.
“They won’t let me leave without someone to take care of me.”
“Leave where?” The absurdity of the situation made my skin tingle. “And why on earth would you call me?” I held the phone away from my ear to stare down at it. Maybe I’d entered some kind of warped reality. “Is this a joke? If it is, it’s not funny.”
He sniffled. “Hadley, I need you. Can you please come?” he whispered, and his voice broke. “I’m so confused.”
Just then, my co-chair, John, dashed into the bathroom, all six feet of him. He walked quickly toward me when he saw no one else in the bathroom. “Hadley, sweetie,” he said calmly. His voice was way too calm. He spoke to me like I was an injured dog on the side of the highway. Like I was a horse that was ready to bolt. He thrust his phone at me. “Look at this,” he hissed. I took the phone and stared down at it. He had a video pulled up from a social media site. It showed a horrific car crash. One of the cars had been mangled and was lying on its roof.
“That happened two nights ago,” he said.
I shoved his phone at him. “So what?”
He bent down so he could stare into my eyes. “Sweetheart, that’s Jason’s car. He’s in the hospital. It’s all over the news.”
I sucked in a breath. Then I steeled my spine. “What does that have to do with me?”
He looked at me, his eyes softening in sympathy. “It has everything to do with you, and you damn well know it.”
“We are divorced,” I reminded him.
He took a deep breath through his nose like he was steeling himself. “Sweetie, you need to go to the hospital,” he tried again.
I heard a voice from my phone. I lifted it back to my ear. “Look, Hadley,” the voice said, “I have no idea what’s happening. I don’t understand anything. But I do know that I need you. Can you please come?”
He sounded almost like the old Jace, the one I used to love. But that man was long gone. He’d been gone for a long time.
“This can’t be real,” I said.
“Please,” Jace said again. I could hear beeping and voices in the background where he was.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“At the hospital. The one close to our apartment,” he explained.
“Our old apartment,” I reminded him. We’d both moved before the divorce.
“What?” he asked. “What happened to our apartment?”
I sucked in a breath and let it out slowly. I would have to go there, if for no other reason than to tell him he could go and suck donkey balls. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Thanks, Hadley,” he said, and I could almost hear him smiling through the phone. Jace didn’t smile. Not anymore. Now he smirked, but he never smiled. He’d forgotten how.
“Sure,” I replied. I tapped the screen to end the call.
“Do you want me to drive you?” John asked.
I shook my head. “I need you to find out what’s going on,” I said.
“Go to the hospital, Hadley. Find out what’s going on for yourself.”
I nodded, and John and I arranged for him to replace me in court. The judge wasn’t too happy, but John knew everything about the case and would, at worst, ask for a continuance.
“Call me later, okay?” he said.
I nodded and jumped into my car to go to the hospital, the hospital that was near the apartment that wasn’t ours anymore, to see the man who wasn’t my husband anymore, knowing that I would have to reopen those old wounds that had finally scabbed over.
I steeled myself on the ride over, and when I parked, I stepped out of the car feeling like I was walking to my execution.
I strode through the doors, the whoosh of air from the ceiling blowing my hair back. I always wore it loose when I was in court. A pleasant attorney won more cases. Successful women had to also look pretty, after all.
I marched up to the desk, and the woman ignored me. I rapped on the window with my knuckles, and she looked up. She rolled her eyes, slid the window open, cracked her gum, and said, “May I help you?”
“I need to know where to find Jason Jenkins?”
“And you are?” she asked.
“His…” I stopped. What was I? I was nothing. Not anymore. “I’m his wife,” I lied. Ex-wife. Wife. To-may-toe, to-mah-toe. I held up my phone like it mattered. “He called me,” I explained.
She tapped on her keyboard, staring at the screen, and finally lifted her gaze. “Level five,” she said. “Room 512.” She closed the little window with a clunk.
I turned to find the elevator, my heart in my throat as I went up.
When I got to the fifth level, I looked for room 512, stopped outside, and took a deep breath. “Mrs. Jenkins?” a voice called, and a white-clad doctor strode toward me.
I nodded. “Yes?”
“If I may have a word?” he said, his voice calm, almost soothing.
I tugged on the tail of my jacket. “About?”
He took a deep breath like he was steeling himself.
“Your husband has suffered a traumatic brain injury,” he explained. His eyes narrowed. “You’re aware that he was in a car accident?”
“I just saw the pictures on a news app,” I explained.
“Two days ago, he was brought in with a sprained wrist and a bump on the head.”
“Okay,” I replied. I looked through the little window on the door and saw Jace staring at nothing. “Is he going to be all right?” I asked. I shouldn’t even care. And if this doctor knew anything about our relationship and how it had ended, he wouldn’t ask me to.
“His wrist will heal, but his head may take longer.”
“How bad is it?”
“Here’s the thing,” he said as he winced. “His head injury will heal. He might suffer from headaches, nausea, vomiting, and some other issues, but the big problem he’s having right now is memory loss.”
I spun around to face him. “Memory loss?” I repeated. What did that even mean?
“He doesn’t remember any current events. His last memory is from five years ago.”
“But his memory will come back?”
He winced again. “We never know with the brain. The good news is that he’s retaining current information. He remembers yesterday, and he even remembers two days ago. But he doesn’t remember anything before that.” He held his hands about a foot apart. “There’s about a five-year gap in his memory.”
“Well, you can keep him here until he’s better, right?”
He shook his head. “Our hospital is over-run. We need the bed. And, physically, there’s no reason to keep him here.” He reached into a little pocket on the outside of the hospital room door and retrieved a folder. It had doctor’s notes, medication information, prescriptions, handouts about brain injuries, and reminder cards for future visits.
I held up the folder. “Did you call me because I’m still listed as his emergency contact? He should have had that changed by now.”
He shook his head. “We called you because you’re the only person he asked for. The nurses called about a dozen times, and then he started calling too.” He smiled gently. “He remembered your number.”
But he didn’t remember that we’d divorced. And that it wasn’t at all amicable. It was painful and time-consuming, and it changed me a little bit on the inside.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll talk to him briefly and take him wherever he needs to go.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think you understand, Mrs. Jenkins. He can’t be left alone. Not right now. He will need care.”
I puffed out a laugh that sounded a lot like a fart. “And you think I’m going to give him that?”
He pointed toward the room and jabbed his finger in Jace’s direction. “No, he thinks you’re going to give him that.”
He shook his head and turned to walk away.
I knocked on the door and shoved it open at the same time. Jason turned to face me, and he smiled at me. It was that old smile that he used to have, the one that made me think he loved me more than anything in the world, and I stumbled as little as I fell into the room.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” he gushed as he turned the wheelchair he was sitting in toward me.
I sat down in the chair across from him. “Jason,” I said slowly.
He startled so visibly that I could see his muscles tense. “What’s wrong with you, Hadley?” he asked, his brow furrowing. “You never call me Jason.”
I called him Jason because he wasn’t my Jace anymore. He wasn’t anyone I knew or wanted to know.
“Why did you call me on the phone, Jason?” I asked.
“Who else would I call?” He stared at me, confused.
I threw up my hands. “Anybody!” I said. “You could have called anybody.” I took a deep breath and tried a different tact. “The current year is 2023.”
“I know. They told me. I don’t understand, though.”
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
He smiled. “We took a trip to the mountains to go camping. We went for a week, and we hiked the big trail.”
I reached back into my memory. “That was in 2016.” So, he had forgotten a little more than five years.
He nodded. “Our anniversary. Do you remember, Hadley? We fished for our dinner, walked the trails all day, and made love all night.” His eyes look happy. He didn’t look like Jason at all. He looked like my Jace.
“You don’t remember anything after that?”
He shook his head. “No, but they say my memory can come back with time. I just need time.”
I reached up and massaged my forehead. I got to my feet. “I can’t do this, Jason.” I really couldn’t do this. Not with him. Not now. Not ever.
His brow wrinkled again. “You don’t call me Jason,” he said again. “Stop it. It’s weirding me out.”
I leaned toward him and spoke succinctly. “I don’t call you anything.” Or at least not anything nice. “We’re not married anymore.”
“Why not?” His eyes danced across my face. “What happened to us?”
“It’s a long story,” I prevaricated. I rubbed my chest because my heart hurt. It was so tender right now, and I’d promised I’d never put myself in this position again.
“I have time,” he said softly.
“Well, I don’t.” I gestured toward the door. “They said you need to go with someone who can care for you. Do you want me to call someone?”
He finally looked away. “You know I don’t have anybody but you, Hadley,” he said.
His parents had died about ten years ago. He was an only child, and he’d never known his grandparents or extended family.
“Do you have a friend you can call?” Someone he was dating, perhaps.
He shrugged. “Not that I know of.” He whispered, “There’s just you.” He patted the arms of his chair and smiled. “Let’s go home.”
“We don’t have a home.” I’d already told him this. “We moved out of the apartment.”
“Where do you live?”
“I moved to the cottage.”
“Your grandmother’s place? I love that cottage. Let’s go there.” He wheeled himself forward and went past me. “Come on. Let’s go.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Hadley, where am I going to go?” He suddenly looked like a lost little boy. And I couldn’t just leave him.
If I left him here, he’d be unsafe. But if he went with me, I would be. I took a deep breath.
“Fine,” I said. “But you’re sleeping in the spare room.”
His brow furrowed. “Why?”
“We are not married anymore,” I said again. “It’s the spare room or nothing.”
His brow furrowed, but he shrugged. “Okay.”
“And this is only temporary, Jason.”
“Jace,” he corrected softly.
I shook my head. “You are not my Jace anymore,” I bit out.
“Well, you’re still my Hadley,” he said.
“I’m not.”
“You are.” He grinned playfully, which made me groan. “Tell me one thing,” he said.
“What?” I heaved out a breath.
“Why do you hate me?” He stared into my eyes, his brown gaze not even flinching.
I rubbed my chest again because it still hurt. “Let’s go,” I said. I looked down at the folder. “I think we have to pick up some medications from the pharmacy.”
He nodded. “Okay,” he said softly.
“This is temporary,” I reminded him. “Just until I figure out what to do with you.”
“Okay,” he said again. He rolled toward the door. “Let’s go.”