Chapter 6
Chapter Six
RYDER
I one-hand Julien and push him back in the seat.
“I’ll pull over and kick you out of the car if you look at the speedometer again.”
His knee bounces a mile a minute. “Can’t you go any faster?”
“No.”
Elijah leans forward and reaches around Julien’s headrest. Julien grabs on to his hand like a lifeline.
Checking the map on the phone mounted to the dashboard, Julien says, “Take the next right.”
I slow down and flick the blinker to indicate a turn.
“I can see the screen just fine, Jules.”
I turn into the parking lot for an apartment complex, and my nerves skyrocket. I don’t know anyone who lives here, and not many students have returned yet. Classes don’t start for two weeks, and freshman move-in day isn’t until next Saturday.
“Look for his truck.”
“Do you think this is where she lives?” Elijah asks as we scan the parking lot.
“I don’t know.” I don’t know anything anymore.
It’s funny how your entire world can tip over in an instant. The morning started like every other. And then everything changed.
Julien taps my shoulder when he spots Jay’s truck. “Over there.”
As soon as I turn off the engine, we’re out of the car.
“Do you see him?”
We look up when we hear raised voices. A door to an apartment on the second floor is wide open and hanging off its hinges.
Alarm curdles like acid in my stomach.
“He wouldn’t,” Jules says. “Jay wouldn’t be that idiotic.”
“Oh, fuck.” I take off at a run.
My feet grow wings when I race up the stairs and see her through the doorway. My heart seizes. Literally stops beating. Elizabeth is mere feet away, so close that I could reach out and touch her.
Tears choke my eyes as I look at her. I’m unable to move as a whirlwind of conflicting emotions consumes me. The anguish of her absence collides with the relief of her return, and they combine with an overwhelming surge of happiness that threatens to engulf me.
She slams into me on her way out and jumps into my arms.
“Help me.”
Needing to make sure she’s real, I brush a hand down her hair in a soft caress.
Her fingers frantically grip my shirt. “Please help me. That man broke into my apartment. He grabbed me.”
Her terror is palpable and has my vision hazing with red when I see Jay standing in her living room.
My arms band around her. “You’re safe, Elizabeth. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
“Liz,” Jay says, and she physically flinches.
I cut him a scathing look to shut the hell up.
She clings to me, and dear god, she feels like paradise wrapped in my arms.
“I promise that you’re safe. No one will hurt you.”
Elizabeth glances over my shoulder, and deep lines etch her brow when she notices Julien and Elijah. Creases of confusion wrinkle her forehead when she looks back at Jay.
“There are two of you? I don’t understand what’s happening.”
That’s a huge understatement. I feel like we’ve walked into the Upside Down.
“I know things must be confusing. It’s the same for us. You act like you don’t know who we are. We’ve been searching for you for over a year.”
Her frightened gaze locks onto my face. “I don’t know who any of you are. I don’t remember .”
She doesn’t remember us? How is that possible?
Elijah pulls out his phone. He opens a folder and swipes to an old selfie of him and Liz sitting in the bleachers at one of Julien’s high school soccer games.
Pointing to himself in the picture, he asks, “Do you remember me?”
She shakes her head. “No. Should I?”
“I’m Elijah.”
A dark head of hair pokes out from the apartment next door. “Do you mind? I just got off the night shift, and I’m trying to go to sleep.” He slams his door closed.
“Maybe it’s best if we talk inside,” I suggest, and Elizabeth immediately tenses.
Her gaze bounces between the four of us before she reluctantly nods. “Okay.”
Slipping free, she presses back against the wonky door, one foot in and one foot out of her apartment as she warily watches us cross the threshold.
Her apartment is spacious with an open-concept layout. A granite counter island separates the kitchen from the living room. There’s an attached breakfast nook and a short hallway that must lead to the bedroom. Furniture that appears brand-new decorates the space, and a few moving boxes are scattered around, waiting to be unpacked.
“Liz. Baby. Please ,” Jay pleads.
Julien takes his forearm and drags him to the couch. “Sit your ass down, shut up, and give her a damn minute. I can’t believe you broke down her fucking door,” he seethes in a harsh whisper.
Jay grapples against his brother’s firm hold, but Jules, none too gently, forces his obstinate ass down onto the couch.
Elijah takes a seat next to him. “Jay, you’re scaring her.”
Somehow, thankfully, what he says gets through.
I ease down to the floor in front of her, and two long, awkward minutes pass as she stares at us and we stare at her, and no one says anything.
I use that time to take her in, still not believing she’s actually here.
She looks different, yet somehow the same. She’s more muscular, her arms more defined. The soft green of her eyes is the same, but the wariness and discomfort sheltered behind them are new. There isn’t a flicker of recognition. Nothing. What happened to her?
“Where have you been?” I ask.
Her head cants to the side with trepidation.
With my heart trying to climb its way up my throat, I wait for her to say something. Anything .
When she doesn’t, I ask, “You don’t remember any of us?”
Her hands fidget at her sides, her fists clenching and unclenching. She looks like she wants to bolt but is forcefully willing her feet to remain glued to the floor.
“I don’t…” She taps the fingers of her right hand against her outer thigh like piano keys. “The only thing I remember is waking up in a hospital. I was…in a coma…that’s what I was told anyway. I don’t really know since…” Her chin dips to her sternum, and she shrugs.
“You were in the hospital in Fallen Brook. We visited you every day. We were told some guy showed up. A cousin or something. And then you just vanished. No one would tell us who the guy was or where he took you. Where have you been?”
She swallows, then clears her throat and takes a small, tentative step forward. “Um…Seattle.”
“Seattle?” Jay practically shouts.
Elizabeth doesn’t retreat this time. On the contrary, she looks pissed. Anger visibly vibrates through her body like a plucked string.
“Look, I don’t know you, and to be honest, I’m a hell of a lot freaked out right now. How can I believe anything you’re saying?”
Following Elijah’s example, I take out my phone, open my camera roll, and offer it to her. She quickly snatches it from my grasp and swipes through photo after photo. Varied reactions steamroll across her face, changing from anger to intrigue to amusement.
“That looks just like mine,” she remarks.
“What does?”
She flips the screen around to show me the image. “The car. Mine is red.”
I pull back, astonished. “The red Hellcat parked outside is yours?”
A small grin curves her lips. “Yeah.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“I’m Julien.”
She swipes through more pictures, then stops on one. “Is this us?”
She shows him the photo, and hope kindles that she recognizes it’s him and not Jay. Even though they’re identical twins, Liz could always tell them apart.
“How can you tell that’s me?”
“The hair.” She keeps swiping. “And this is you?” she asks Jay.
“Yes.”
Leaving her guarded stance, she sits cross-legged on the floor next to me.
“At the student union earlier, you said that you’ve known me since you were nine.”
“We met in third grade. You’ve known Jay and Jules since you were six. We lived on the same street, Fallen Brook Drive. We all grew up together. We were best friends.”
She doesn’t stop me when I reach out and push a lock of her hair behind her ear.
“You were my girlfriend,” Jay blurts and offers his phone to her.
I don’t know how long we sit there as she goes back and forth, shuffling through the images on our phones.
She double taps on a photo of Elijah and Julien to enlarge it. “You guys make a cute couple.”
“Thanks,” Elijah replies, and she smiles at him.
It’s the first time she’s looked at ease since we arrived.
The longer we sit there, the more antsy Jay becomes. “Liz. Please, sweetheart. I’m dying here. I need to hold you. Can I please hold you?”
Her head snaps up, and she scowls. “Why?”
“What the hell do you mean, why?”
“Jay, chill,” I tell him.
Elizabeth abruptly stands. “Why would I let some crazy man who kicked my door in and scared the crap out of me touch me?”
“You’re the love of my life. We were supposed to get married. Start a family. Have a life together. I’ve been dead for a year, missing you. Don’t you understand any of that?”
Apparently, that was the wrong thing to say because she unleashes on him.
“I don’t give a shit what I see in the pictures. You’re a complete stranger. You’re the scary guy who barged into my home uninvited and unwelcome. I’m not going to stand here and allow you to bully me into feeling something that I don’t fucking remember!”
I’m pretty sure all our eyes widen. I think I can count on one hand the times I ever heard her say “fuck.” The soft-spoken, sweet girl we once knew is not the fiery, rage-filled woman currently glaring at us.
Jay pounds a fist to his chest. “I love you, and you love me.”
“I don’t know who you are! I’m sorry if that upsets you. I’m sorry if my nonexistent memory causes problems for you . But you can’t barge into my apartment and demand that I love you or tell me that I’m your girlfriend. I don’t even know who I am!”
“Liz,” Jay chokes out, tears falling unbidden.
Her head drops in shame when she sees them. “I’m sorry. I just…I don’t…”
Elijah tries to defuse the tense situation. “This is difficult for everyone. The most important thing is that you’re okay.”
Elizabeth inhales, holds it, then blows it out in a rush. “From the pictures, I get that we knew each other and were friends. I get that. But please understand how confusing this is for me. I don’t know any of you. You’re all strangers to me.”
All the nights I dreamed about seeing her again never prepared me for this fucked-up mess, one I have no freaking clue how to begin fixing.
“Why don’t we order some pizzas and sit down and talk, yeah?” Julien suggests.
She looks like she wants to tell him hell no and to get the fuck out of her apartment, but something stops her. Maybe her curiosity is piqued.
“Yeah, okay. I need to call Drew and Daniel first.”
“Who the hell are Drew and Daniel?” Jay snaps.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Needing to get him away from her for a few minutes so he can get his head on straight, I get up and pull Jay off the sofa by the belt loops of his shorts.
“Help me fix her door since you’re the one who broke it. Do you still have that toolbox in your truck? Jay,” I prompt when he ignores me.
“What?”
“The toolbox in the truck. Fix her door.”
He reluctantly rips his gaze away from Elizabeth. “Fine.”
The sun’s angle is blinding when we step outside as it reflects off the windshields of the cars parked in front of the building. Sweat begins to trickle down the valley of my spine once we get to the bottom of the stairs. When we’re out of earshot, I lay into him.
“What is wrong with you?”
“Drop it.”
Not going to happen.
“Didn’t you see how badly you scared her? You broke down her damn door.”
Guilt takes a ride on his shoulders, hunching them inward. “I saw her and—forget it. What I did was inexcusable.”
“She doesn’t remember us, Jay. Things are clearly screwed up. We need to find out what happened to her, and freaking her out isn’t helping.”
Jay’s jaw locks tight, but he nods.
We get to the truck, and he pops the tailgate. The bed bounces a few times when he jumps into it and opens the storage box. I take the toolbox from him when he hops down.
“Before we go back up, I want to talk to you.”
“I need to get back to Liz.” The tears return, and he furiously dries them with the hem of his T-shirt. “You don’t understand.”
Hating to see him like this, I cuff the back of his neck and touch our foreheads together. “Then help me understand.”
The blunt nails of his calloused fingers dig into my back when he falls into me. This is not two friends hugging. This is him seeking safe harbor, trusting me to be the pillar of strength he needs right now.
“The last words I said to her were ‘get out.’ I kicked her out of my house that night. And for what? For protecting Jules? For standing by him when he needed her? What happened to her is my fault.”
“It’s not your fault.”
He buries his face deep into my neck, his grip on me like a vise, squeezing me until I can barely breathe.
“I didn’t protect her. I wasn’t there to save her.” He collapses to the ground in the middle of the parking lot, a broken man consumed by regret.
I crouch down beside him and rest a hand on his shoulder. The guilt I harbor eats at me every day. When we kissed, I shouldn’t have stopped us. I should have kept her there with me. There are so many things I wish I could go back and do differently.
“She’s here now, alive and safe. It’s nothing short of a miracle. So let’s fix her door, eat some pizza, and spend time with our girl.” My voice catches on the last word.
He grasps my proffered hand, and I pull him to stand.
“She looks good, doesn’t she? But what’s with the hair?”
A small smile tugs the corners of my mouth. “I like the pink streaks.”
When he traces his thumb under his chin, only then do I notice the slight redness and swelling.
“She’s got a mean hook. Clocked me good before you guys showed up. Missed crushing my balls by inches. She’s changed. We have a fighter on our hands.”
She punched him?
“Elizabeth has always been a fighter,” I reply somberly. “Come on. Let’s make sure Jules doesn’t order any pizza with pineapple on it.”
The pizzas arrive by the time Jay and I fix her front door. Elizabeth will need to get maintenance to replace it and check the doorjamb fittings. At least it hangs right and closes properly, so she can deadbolt it.
“…and CU allowed me to defer since I was already accepted. So here I am.”
Crammed around the small breakfast nook table, Elizabeth has been answering every question we’ve asked her.
“How long were you in the coma?” Elijah inquires, rolling his pizza slice like a burrito and biting it in half.
Elizabeth licks grease off her fingers. “I was told about two months.”
Two months? Our faces collectively display our dismay.
She touches the back of her head. “They told me the swelling in my brain was what caused it. Daniel and Drew placed me in an excellent rehab facility. The staff was wonderful. I did all my outpatient with them, too, so I got to know many of the doctors and nurses on a personal level. One thing I don’t miss is all the poking and prodding and MRIs.”
“If you were in a medical rehab facility, why couldn’t our PI find you?” Jay asks.
Elizabeth shifts uncomfortably in her seat. “Probably because of Daniel and Drew. They kept me in a private facility under a false name. Said it was for my protection. You and Elijah remind me of them,” she says to Julien.
Elizabeth already told us about her distant cousin, Daniel, and his husband, Drew. How they took emergency guardianship over her, flew her to Washington state, and have been caring for her over the past year.
We were surprised to hear that she had a distant cousin who we never knew existed. In the decade we’ve known her, no other family members ever visited. Both sets of her grandparents were deceased. There were no aunts or uncles. As far as we knew, it was just her, Hailey, and their parents.
She peels a slice of pepperoni from her pizza and nibbles it. “They own some big tech company. D & D.”
“How bad is your amnesia?” I ask, no longer avoiding the topic.
We haven’t asked her about that night . We’re too afraid to bring it up. If there were ever an upside to amnesia, not remembering your entire family being murdered in front of you would be a blessing.
I wish I could forget. Holding her in my arms, watching her gasp for breath. All the blood. It’s a nightmare I can never escape. There hasn’t been a night I haven’t woken in a cold sweat, my heart hammering so hard, it feels like I’m dying.
Elizabeth mimics Elijah’s pizza burrito and takes a big bite off the end. “It’s basically like someone wiped my operating system clean, and I was rebooted. I recall things like math and science—school stuff. I can play the guitar and the piano, but I can’t remember how I learned to play. I remember songs and movies. It’s the people, places, and events from before that are missing.”
I pick the plastic wrapping off my water bottle. “You must remember some things. Why else would you pick a Hellcat like mine for your car?”
She chews as she considers my question. “I guess you’re right. Everything’s just locked away. The doctors are cautiously optimistic that things will come back to me, but they can’t make any guarantees. I do have flashes of memories. Like tiny little puzzle pieces I have to string together to make a complete picture, except there are a lot of missing pieces.” Her gaze holds mine. “I had some flashes of you today.”
My pulse quickens. “You remembered me?”
“Kind of.”
Her cheeks pink when she becomes the rapt focus of four sets of eyes.
“What did you remember?”
“Um. I can only recall a little. Like us driving in a car with the windows down…and there’s this song playing on the radio.” She hums a few measures, and I bust out with the biggest smile.
“‘Alive’ by P.O.D.”
“How long have the two of you been dating?” she asks Julien.
Taking Elijah’s hand, he replies, “A few years. We met in seventh grade at one of Jay’s swim meets.”
I’m pretty sure I hear Elizabeth sigh when Elijah says, “I fell hard for Julien. Love at first sight.”
“I fell for him, too, but it took me a while to come to terms with my bisexuality. You were the first person I came out to.”
“I was?” She seems happy to hear that.
“You were our biggest cheerleader. I’ll never be able to repay you for everything you did for us.”
Her phone chimes, and she reads whatever text message arrived. “It’s Daniel. I think it’s time I call it a night. I’m tired.”
We don’t push our luck, not even Jay. Getting up from the table, I take her empty plate and glass and walk over to the sink to rinse them before placing them inside the dishwasher.
“I can do that,” she says, following me into the kitchen.
“Already done.”
I slide over to her side and playfully bump her hip. “What’s your number?”
“Can I get in on that as well?” Julien asks, taking out his phone.
I hate the deer-in-headlights look that overtakes her.
“I guess so,” she hesitantly replies.
After we get her digits, she cautiously approaches Jay. “Do you want my number, too?”
One eyebrow arches. “Do you want me to have it?”
“Do you think I should?”
He laughs, and she smiles. A genuine, honest-to-goodness smile.
It disappears quickly, and she goes as rigid as a plank of wood when he hugs her.
“I’ve missed you so much, Princess. I’m so fucking happy you’re here,” he whispers into her hair. “Sorry about the door.”
She squirms and pushes on his chest to be let go. “I appreciate you fixing it, Jay.”
“It’s Jayson.”
She looks at him quizzically. “Pardon?”
“You always called me Jayson. Not Jay.”
“I’ll take a hug, if that’s okay,” Elijah says, breaking the tension.
The veil of unease that had been shrouding her falls away when she readily gets enveloped in his arms.
“You need anything, call anytime.”
Her cheek brushes his shirt when she nods. “Thank you. I might just take you up on that.”
As I leave, I hear her say, “Thank you, Ryder.”
Turning around, I ask, “Thank me for what?”
She steps closer, and her familiar jasmine scent has so many memories flooding back.
I love you. I’ve missed you so much.
“For being a good guy. For understanding. For being here.”
With my heart in my hand and emotion choking me, I graze my knuckles down her cheek. “Anything for you, sweet Elizabeth.”
“Ry, you coming?” Jay snaps, hovering at the door, a pissed-off sneer on his lips.
When we get down to the parking lot, he slams the tailgate closed, sits on the edge of the bumper, and blows out a ragged breath.
“That was…”
Intense. Heartbreaking. Confusing as hell. Upsetting. Really fucking weird. Take your pick.
Feeling them all, I reply, “Yeah.”
Elizabeth is back. She’s here. No more searching or wondering or worrying. But she doesn’t remember us, and I’m terrified that she will disappear again, for good.
Julien sinks his hands deep into his front pockets. “At least we now know what happened to her.”
Jay collapses in on himself, elbows to knees. “But, fuck, Jules. Amnesia? It’s like losing her all over again. I don’t know what to do. I need someone to tell me what to do.”
“I don’t think there is anything we can do right now.”
“What if she never remembers? What if she doesn’t want anything to do with us?”
“I refuse to believe that,” I reply.
“We need to tell our parents,” Julien says. “Sit down and talk about what happens next. Can we get the PI to look into her cousin, Daniel? Make sure he’s legit.”
Jay flashes him a look of vexation. “That fucker didn’t even know she was here right under our noses. Whose idea was it to hire that idiot?”
“It was yours,” I remind him.
“Next time, veto my ass.” He sighs and rubs a hand over his face. “How can we make her remember?”
“We can’t. What we need to do is be there for her in whatever way she’ll let us. Elizabeth isn’t lost to us. She’s still in there. Think about it. She didn’t call the police tonight, even though she had every reason to. She trusted us enough to be alone with four guys she doesn’t remember. She was very interested in all the pictures we showed her. She talked to us about Seattle.”
I look across the parking lot at the sleek red Hellcat parked in one of the “For Residents” spaces.
Her heart remembers us, even if her mind doesn’t.