Page 19 of Wanted

Yeah, right.

“Any questions?” The doctor returns his stethoscope to his neck, and I lie back down.

“Will my memory come back?”

He palpates my scalp, and I wince.

“I’m sorry. I can’t say for certain. Sometimes it does. Other times, that moment is just gone.”

A blip in time simply erased. A few minutes shouldn’t matter in the span of a life, but for some reason, I feel like this moment was important.

“Anything else?” he asks kindly.

Nothing he can help me with anyway. “No, that’s it."

“I’ll get someone in with the brace, and we’ll get you out of here. If anything worsens, give us a call.”

He departs with the sound of the curtain drawing shut.

Only for it to reopen a second later.

“You have to stop barging in here,” I sputter at Jude. “I could be naked!”

He crosses confidently into my room. “Oh, please. You aren’t going to be naked for a broken arm.”

“Maybe my ribs are broken, and they undressed me.”

His mouth forms a hard line as he traces my body with those sharp silver eyes. “Are they?”

My shoulders slump, and I cover my face with my arm. “No.”

“Good.”

A peek beneath my limb reveals him rocking back into his heels. His eyes are unfocused, as if his mind is a hundred miles away.

“You can go, you know.”

“Did you call someone to come get you?” he asks.

“I don’t have a phone.”

The air he releases vibrates with an incredulous huff. He extends his phone between us. “Here.”

I wave him off. “Don’t bother.”

“You really have a hard time taking the help offered to you, don’t you?”

“It isn’t hard when I don’t have anybody to call.” The confession slips from between my lips before I can clamp them shut.

“I figured that fiancé of yours was a good-for-nothing son of a bitch, but your parents?”

I nearly smile at his apt description of Dillon. Before I can, his question steals the humor away.

“Drug users, remember? We don’t have a lot of contact unless they’re asking me for money.”

“What about your friends?”

My laugh is humorless. “The ones I have are decent people, but compassion doesn’t give them the means to come get me. I’m a couple of hours from home at least.”

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