refused to answer the question; instead, he asked, “Who are you?” Immediately, he was aware he sounded abrupt and hostile—quite a feat for someone as naturally abrupt and hostile as himself. But the woman unsettled him, ruffled him somehow, and he wanted to figure out what it was, exactly, she did to him. And why.
To his surprise, it was the truculent kid who answered. While he had seemed peeved at the woman himself, now he moved to stand between her and Emmett, a purely protective stance. “She’s Linda Faraday,” the boy said. “I’m Ricky. Who are you?”
Linda Faraday. Her son, Ricky. Emmett’s gut tightened. He’d forgotten about them in the days since Ryan’s death. Perhaps it explained the disquiet he’d felt when looking at the older man’s photo. And perhaps it was why he’d reacted so strongly to the woman a few minutes before—his subconscious had recognized her and remembered his promise. Not the one he’d made for Ryan, about capturing Jason, but that promise he’d made to Ryan.
“Well?” the kid said. “Who are you?”
Emmett took in a long breath, then gazed into Linda Faraday’s wide blue eyes. Springtime. He had to shove the thought away before it derailed him. “I’m the man who’s going to be looking after you,” he told her.
Back inside the house, Emmett didn’t waste any time. Rather than wandering about, Emmett asked the first person he knew if he’d seen Dr. Violet Fortune. That person had, and Emmett strode through the somber crowds to find Dr. Fortune in the dining room, putting fruit salad on a small plate.
“I need some of your time, Violet,” he told her.
She set down the silver serving spoon, then turned and studied his face. “What you need is more rest, less guilt and a good meal or two. That’ll be two hundred dollars. You can mail a check to my home office.”
“Ha-ha.” He didn’t crack a smile. “I want to talk to you about Linda Faraday.”
“Oh, well, I’m not her doctor, and even if I were, I couldn’t—”
“Ryan spoke to you about her, didn’t he?” Linda Faraday and her son, Ricky, had been Ryan’s source of guilt for over a decade, thanks to the car accident caused by his brother, Cameron, who had been driving drunk. Cameron had died in that accident, and Linda, his passenger, had been terribly hurt. Ryan had kept that secret from the public and from his family, except for Lily and Violet. Linda had been pregnant with Cameron’s child. That boy was Ricky.
Violet gave a little nod. “Ryan talked about her situation more than a time or two, but it was with the understanding that the situation was confidential. I wouldn’t feel right discussing—”
“Discuss traumatic brain injury with me, then.” Because that was what Linda Faraday had suffered ten years before. “And discuss comas and recovery and rehabilitation and—”
“Okay, okay.” Violet put a cool hand on his arm. “Am I to assume you mean you want to discuss these things now?”
Maybe he should have felt guilty for insisting, but he didn’t. He’d felt helpless in the face of Ryan’s death and stymied in discovering Jason’s whereabouts, but here was something, finally, he could take action on. “Yes, now. Please,” he added as an afterthought.
Half smiling and shaking her head, Violet patted his arm. “How about we meet in the study after I give Peter a heads-up? Celeste is at home, so we didn’t plan on staying long.”
Emmett grimaced. Celeste was the little girl that Peter and Violet were adopting, and she’d recently gone through serious back surgery and rehabilitation of her own. “Tell your husband I’ll make it as brief as I can.”
Violet gave another shake of her head and another half smile. “You’re not long-winded, I can say that for you, Emmett.”
Which meant he was brusque to a fault. But he could live with that, especially when Violet got back to him so quickly. Emmett had secured a private place for their chat on a short leather sofa in a far corner of the study. When she settled beside him, he took his eyes off the massive burl wood desk at one end of the room. “The last time I was in here, Ryan seemed to take up more space than that desk of his,” he murmured.
Violet handed him one of two cups of coffee she held. “We’re all trying to grasp the fact that Ryan’s gone.”
But Emmett, on the other hand, was going to do something about it. He couldn’t bring the man back, of course, but he could follow through with the pledge he’d made to him. “Traumatic brain injury,” he prompted without more ado.
“I just love these little social niceties of yours, Emmett,” Violet said, grimacing. Then she seemed to take pity on him. “All right. I’ll stop wasting your time. Traumatic brain injury.”
She sipped from her cup, then began. “Otherwise known as TBI, or head injury, it’s simply damage to the brain caused by an external force. It’s common in vehicle accidents, when impact can cause the brain to bounce back and forth against the skull. That causes bruising to the brain and, later, swelling. Head injuries are the number-one killer of Americans under the age of forty-four. They kill more under the age of thirty-four than all diseases combined.”
Emmett absorbed the numbers, but at the moment only one person with a head injury mattered to him. “Do all people with a TBI go into a coma?”
“Serious injury can occur without a loss of consciousness, but in a TBI, usually the brain stem is injured and that produces a period of coma that may last for some time.”
“But in a coma for years? Is that usual, Violet?”
The good doctor hesitated, because, Emmett knew, they were getting into Linda Faraday-specific territory. She’d gone into a coma following the car accident. Then the doctors had discovered she was a couple of months pregnant. She’d given birth in that state and stayed in that state until a little over a year ago.
“What’s more unusual, Emmett,” Violet finally said, “is for a patient to recover enough to make an independent life for herself after so long.”
“It’s not like the movies, huh? Snoozing away until one day the patient awakes, refreshed and alert?”
Violet shook her head. “Maybe for Sleeping Beauty, but in the real world that doesn’t happen. In the case of Linda—” She stopped herself. “Emmett, I don’t feel right about this.”
He didn’t waste his breath arguing with her. “Let’s talk hypotheticals, then. If a hypothetical patient were in a coma…”
Violet was shaking her head again.
“She wasn’t in a coma?”
“The technical definition of a coma is an altered state of consciousness in which the patient’s eyes don’t open and the patient doesn’t react to pain or commands, or doesn’t speak in recognizable words. So while the hypothetical patient might start out that way, once she can react, respond or speak, then she’s no longer in a coma, though she may not yet be returned to full consciousness. In that semiconscious state, patients can be fed, or feed themselves, and get some kinds of physical therapy to keep their muscles from atrophying. There are people who remain in that twilight state for the rest of their lives.”
“So what
