Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
Trevor
Two o’clock rolls around and Ava appears in the doorway. I blink several times and rub my eyes. They’ve gone blurry from all the information I’ve gone over. It’ll take weeks or months to catch up on all of it.
“There’s a diner across the street. Goodwin’s. You always loved their bacon mac-and-cheese. Interested in trying it?”
I stand. “Sure. Who doesn’t love macaroni and cheese?”
Secretly, I hope I do like it. Because just like the iced caramel macchiato, the little things like that seem to put a smile on Ava’s face. And she has an amazing smile.
She doesn’t smile at me all that much. I get it, there’s not much to smile about.
But sometimes when she talks to other people, like when I saw her talking to Chelsea earlier in the storeroom, one of them must have said something amusing, because that smile came out… along with a dimple in her left cheek.
If my loving a stupid plate of bacon macaroni and cheese will cause that dimple to make an appearance, then I’m going to fucking love it, even if I hate it.
I’ve spent a good five hours becoming impressed with Ava and how she single-handedly runs the business. She’s not only beautiful and kind, but she seems crazy smart. And I’m the one who’s supposed to be a doctor.
“How much was I involved in the business?” I ask when we settle into a booth at Goodwin’s.
I wonder for a second if we have a booth here like we have at the coffee house.
She looks pleased. She always looks pleased when I ask questions about my life. So I resolve to ask more.
“Not much really. When you were younger, it was the plan to have you take over the coffee shop, but those plans changed.”
“When your mom died?”
She nods, seemingly impressed that I’ve remembered the conversation.
“You were going to school for a business degree so you could run the coffee house after Dawn and Chuck retired, but you ended up double majoring in business and science because you loved science. You got the job as a paramedic to save up money for grad school. You loved being a paramedic so much, I think even if my mom hadn’t died, you’d have become a doctor.
I’d never seen you happier than when you were helping people.
So instead of grad school for an MBA, you went to med school. ”
“Which the military paid for, which is why I was serving overseas.”
“That’s right.”
A thought crosses my mind that has me a bit scared, and a lot more concerned. “Ah, shit. I was told the accident happened just a few weeks before I was set to go home for good. Do you think they’re going to expect me to go back and finish out those weeks after my memory returns?”
Her head shakes. “You completed your service. I’m actually surprised no one told you this. Your replacement’s deployment was delayed. You actually stayed on an extra month just so they wouldn’t be without a trauma surgeon.”
“We must have been upset about that.”
“Maybe a little, but we knew about it well in advance. It’s not like they plucked you off your return flight and I was stuck wondering where you were.”
“Yeah, but if my replacement had been on time…” I scoff, furious for the umpteenth time at the endless fuckeduppedness that is my life.
“I’ve thought about that a million times,” she says sadly. “But no amount of anger will change what happened. And, honestly, it didn’t take me long to know that when you’re in the military, plans change all the time.”
“Was it hard on you? On us? Being apart all those years? The not knowing?”
A waitress interrupts to take our orders. “Hey, Ava,” she says, then turns to me. “Um…”
“Trevor,” Ava says, “this is Claudia Milano.”
I hold out my hand. “Pleasure.”
She shakes it and I’m struck once again by how strange it must be for people who may have known me my whole life to be looked at like a stranger.
“Sorry,” Claudia says when she realizes she’s staring. “It’s just so weird. I mean, we went to school together.”
“Weird for you?” Ava says in a joking manner.
“We slept together. Walked down the aisle together. Heck, we’re having a—” Ava tenses and looks like she swallowed a bug.
The almost imperceptible flash of horror in her eyes tells me she’s having to hold back.
Because I’ve asked her to. “Uh… we’re having lunch together.
” She sighs. “I’m on a date with my husband and he doesn’t even know me. ”
The joking tone has left her voice and now Claudia is looking at her in pity.
I hand her our menus. “We’ll have the bacon mac-and-cheese.”
Claudia leaves, and the uncomfortable silence surrounds us once again. It surrounds us so much, it’s almost choking me.
“Yes,” Ava says quietly.
I cock my head.
“Yes it was hard on us. Being apart. I mean, probably more for me than you because you were so busy and doing what you loved to do. But it was okay. I never regretted it.” Her eyes close briefly.
“Well, maybe I do now. But I wanted you to be a doctor just as much as you wanted it. It made you happy and that made me happy.” She turns and looks out the window.
“Sorry, I’m doing it again. I know you don’t want to talk about all that stuff. ”
I reach across the table and touch her hand to pull her attention back to me. “It’s okay. I asked the question.”
She stares at my hand as it sits atop hers. I wonder if we did stuff like hold hands in public. She did grab my hand the other day at the party, but it could just have been for support. We’ve been together for decades. Do people who’ve been together that long still do things like hold hands?
Her hand is soft and much smaller than mine. I feel the urge to keep touching her, but she smiles sadly and slips her hand out from beneath mine. Did she not like the way I was doing it? Or does she just not like me?
Once again, I feel bad about this morning and my overreaction. My head is all over the place, and sometimes I can’t control what comes out of my mouth. But as I sit here looking across the table into the gentle eyes of the woman who is my wife, I vow to try.
It’s not long before I notice how many people are staring. And whispering.
Ava notices too. “Ignore them. This is a small town. People here just love excitement and drama. And I’m sure after seeing us together, the rumor mill will be in full force.”
A guy who looks familiar walks over carrying take-out bags.
“Nice to see you again, Trevor.”
I look between him and Ava, hoping someone will tell me who he is.
“This is Tag Calloway,” Ava says. “My friend Maddie’s husband. He was at the party.”
“Oh, right. Yeah, nice to see you.” I tap a finger to my temple. “Sorry about this. Were we friends?”
“Friends?” Tag thinks on it. “I suppose. You were… are… friends with my younger brother, Jaxon. But we hang out as couples sometimes. We should do that soon.” He holds up his bags. “Better get this back before Nora gets too hangry. See you around.”
I lift my chin at Tag, then ask Ava, “Who’s Nora? I thought he was married to Maddie.”
“Nora is his assistant. He owns a sports marketing firm.”
“Maybe you should make me a list.”
“A list?”
“You know, of everyone I’m supposed to know. Their names. Who they are to me. Their spouses. Their jobs.”
“You want a list of everyone you’re supposed to know, but you don’t want to know about us?”
She looks sad, like she’s resigned herself to being second-best in my recovery plan. And that makes me feel like a dick for even saying anything.
“I was joking, Ava.”
Our food gets put on the table and she picks at it. I’ve clearly upset her.
“Okay, fine. Tell me something about us.”
“You don’t have to patronize me.”
I scoop a forkful of macaroni and cheese into my mouth and smile. “Jesus, this is good. And I’m not patronizing you. I’m learning. Tell me something. Anything.”
She pinches her brow, and for a second, she looks like she’s going to drop a fucking bomb on me. Maybe tell me she is, in fact, having an affair with Jason. Or that the business is going under and we don’t have two dimes to rub together. Or that she thinks I’m a complete douche.
She hesitates for a long moment, even tasting her meal, then she shrugs a casual shoulder and says, “We liked to have sex in the morning.”
I choke on a piece of bacon as I laugh. “That is not what I was expecting you to say.”
Suddenly, it’s almost as if I’m seeing her in a new light, and I remember what Carter said about being able to sleep with her for the ‘first time’ again.
I let my eyes trail over the curves of her face, down the cords of her neck, to her barely showing cleavage.
I wonder what her long honey-brown hair would look like all mussed up after a night of sleep.
My mind races, trying to decide what she sleeps in.
One of those short nightie things? A camisole and sleep shorts? Nothing?
I’m amused at my semi-erection. Maybe I’m not as far gone as I’d thought.
It immediately deflates, however, when I think of how much worse this could have been for me.
Imagine waking up, not knowing who you are, and finding out you’re a garbage man, married to an unattractive woman with chin hairs, and have three snotty-nosed kids who have zero boundaries.
Under the table, I kick her foot playfully. “How come we liked having sex in the morning?”
“Shortly after we moved in together, you told me waking up next to me was your favorite time of day. I liked making you happy and wanted to make your mornings even better. It just kind of blew up from there.”
I smile. She smiles. But then for the rest of lunch, we make small talk about things that don’t really matter. I’m grateful she doesn’t push for more. I feel we talked about the past enough to make her happy but not so much that I got overwhelmed.
When the check comes, I get out my new wallet to pay. “Let me get this one.” When Ava looks at me strangely, I realize what I said and roll my eyes. “Right. Joint bank account,” I say with a chuckle, wondering if I’m ever going to get used to this crazy world I live in.
“Trevor?”
The tone of her voice lets me know what comes next is going to be a big question. One I might not want to answer. I sit back against the booth, cross my arms, and wait for the question.
“I know you don’t remember being a doctor. But you still know things. When do we have to worry? Like really worry that your memory will never come back.”
She’s just voiced my worst fear. Logically, I know that a longer duration of amnesia does not necessarily mean memory is less likely to return, especially in cases like mine where the retrograde amnesia is due to my medical condition.
But still, I can’t help but feel that every day I continue to wake up being a stranger to myself is one more nail in the coffin of who I used to be.
“My brain is still recovering. TBIs can take weeks or months to fully heal. I know it seems like the longer it goes on, the less likely it is to happen, but we really should be looking at it like this: the more my brain heals, the closer I come to regaining my memory.”
She sighs like I’ve shown her the light at the end of the tunnel. Like I’ve given her the hope she thought she was running out of. Like I’ve thrown her a life raft in a storm.
But she has no idea what’s really going on in my damaged head. Something is there, deep down, niggling away inside me, telling me that everything I just told her is a load of bullshit.
Because I genuinely feel like this is it. This is my life now. And I’m destined to wake up every day and look at the stranger in the mirror.