“Hello?”
It was the middle of the night, but for the last week Bruce Brand had been sleeping lightly, waiting for any news from the hospital. Savannah, his soon-to-be-ex-wife, had been in a coma after a near-fatal car accident.
“She’s awake.” It was Carol, his mother-in-law, on the other end of the call.
Bruce tossed the covers off his body, sat up on the edge of the bed and dropped his head into the palm of his free hand. “Thank God. Jesus—thank God.”
“She’s been asking for you,” Carol added after a pause.
Bruce lifted his head in surprise. “Asking for me?”
“Yes,” Carol confirmed matter-of-factly. “Will you come?”
“I’m on my way.”
Not thinking, just acting, Bruce stood up as he was ending the call. He grabbed his jeans, which were draped over a chair in the corner of the room, and tugged them on. With his jeans pulled up but still unzipped, he pushed the pillows off the chair, sat down and shoved his foot into his boot.
“What’s going on?” Kerri, the woman he’d been dating for the last six months or so, flipped on the light.
“Savannah’s awake.” Bruce rose after his boots were on.
In the yellow glow of the lamp, the nipples of her full, naked breasts peeking through her wavy, sun-bleached blond hair, Kerri wore an expression of disappointment mixed with resignation on her pretty girl-next-door face.
“And she asked for you,” Kerri stated in a monotone as she pulled the sheet up over her breasts and held it in place with her arms pinned to her sides.
Bruce didn’t bother tucking in his T-shirt; he ran his fingers through the front of his silver-laced black hair several times to push it off his forehead before he put his cowboy hat on. He checked to make sure his wallet was in his back pocket, then grabbed the keys to his truck off the top of the dresser.
“I’m sorry. I have to go.” When he leaned in to kiss her on the lips, she turned her head so her mouth was just out of reach.
Bruce straightened; he understood Kerri well enough to know that this was the beginning of a fight they were going to have later.
Kerri looked up at him, and he genuinely regretted the raw hurt he could easily read in her eyes.
“If this hadn’t happened,” Kerri reminded him, “you’d already be divorced.”
She was right about that. He’d spent the last two years paying for his lawyer to fight with Savannah’s lawyer. He’d received the final draft of the divorce agreement a couple of days before the accident. For now, the divorce was on hold. And, even though they hadn’t lived as man and wife for years, legally he was Savannah’s husband.
“She’s still my wife,” Bruce paused in the doorway to say. “I’ll call when I can.”
* * *
The night of Savannah’s accident, and every day since, had felt more like a surreal dream sequence than reality. For the last week, when he wasn’t working, he was with the Scott family, crammed into the small waiting room designated for families who had a loved one in the critical care unit. Truth be told, he’d never expected to speak to any of Savannah’s kin again, much less spend several hours a day in a confined space with them drinking burnt coffee out of a Styrofoam cup and trying to make sense out of the sudden detour his life had just taken.
When he arrived at the hospital, the feeling in the waiting room had changed dramatically from somber to celebratory. Savannah’s two sisters, Joy and Justine, were smiling with tears of relief and happiness drying on their faces. The peaches-and-cream color had returned to Carol’s plump face, and John, Savannah’s burly father, was actually smiling broadly enough so that the tips of his upper teeth, normally hidden from view behind his thick salt-and-pepper mustache and beard, were visible. But there was one person in the room who didn’t seem to be happy at all.
“Hi, Carol.” Bruce stopped next to Carol and the cowboy Savannah had been dating. He didn’t offer his hand when he said, “Leroy.”
Beside the fact that the cowpoke was dating his wife, Bruce had a hard time keeping his cool around Leroy. It was Leroy’s high-powered muscle car that Savannah had been driving the night of the accident. Leroy had been in the passenger seat and had walked away from the accident with a broken wrist and a couple of scrapes and bruises, while Savannah had shattered the windshield with her skull.
Leroy had a stricken look on his narrow face. “She doesn’t remember me.”
Carol put her hand on Leroy’s arm to comfort him. “She will, Leroy. The doctor said that it may take a couple of days. We just have to be patient and give her some time.”
The cowpoke left with his head bent down, and it occurred to Bruce, for the first time, that Leroy was in love with Savannah.
“What’s he talking about?” he asked Carol.
The Scott clan closed ranks and surrounded him as if they were worried he would try to escape.
Now Carol’s hand was on his arm. “Savannah’s neurologist thinks she may be experiencing some...temporary memory loss.”
No one spoke for a second, but all of the Scotts were watching him like a cat watching fish in a fishbowl. “How temporary?”
“They don’t know.” John spoke directly to him for the first time, instead of communicating through his wife and daughters as was his usual route.
“Bruce.” Carol’s fingers tightened on his arm. “Savannah doesn’t seem to remember the divorce.”
Until right then, Bruce hadn’t felt like he needed to sit down. Now he did. Wordlessly, he took a couple of steps backward and settled in a nearby chair.
Savannah’s family moved as one unit as they followed him, making loud scraping noises on the floor as they pulled chairs closer to him, boxing him in again. Bruce realized now that Savannah’s tight-knit family wasn’t trying to protect him—they were trying to make sure he didn’t leave.
As much as his in-laws knew about Savannah’s condition and potential recovery, they shared with him. Savannah was awake and talking; her speech was a little slurred, but she was making sense. But she had lost, at least temporarily, memory of the last several years. As far as Savannah was concerned, there was no divorce, they hadn’t spent the last two years fighting through their lawyers and she had never moved out of their home. In her mind, they were still happily married. Now he understood
