Page 91 of Shattered Dreams

Baby falls asleep on the couch, at home at Pop’s as much as she is at my apartment.

Things are back to normal, but they feel anything but.

I check my phone, but no one’s tried to get a hold of me. I should give Mom a call and explain what happened, maybe encourage her to find an attorney. She’s going to be in the same situation Willow’s in.

Instead, I crawl into the bed I sleep in when I spend the night, and Baby snuggles next to me, abandoning the couch to keep me company.

I wake up to Pop frying steaks and a replay of a football game flickering on the TV. I sit at the table, sip on a beer, and joke about the things that went down.

It feels like the past five months never happened.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Zarah

Iwake up in a small bedroom, vases of bright, cheerful flowers covering every surface and sunlight shining in through a gleaming picture window. A short stack of books is positioned near a decorative pillow on a bench at the foot of my bed. I don’t know where I am, and I’m missing something, someone, I can’t describe.

A blonde woman who has bright blue eyes sits next to me on a pretty pink and cream chair. Holding my hand, she speaks of things that mean nothing to me. She explains that people are waiting for me to get better, and it won’t be long, only a few days. They questioned someone, Dr. Stephen Mallory, and he helped scientists formulate an antidote. A man named Ashton Black told my brother they made one along with the drug they tested on me.

I’m to take it every morning for the next two weeks.

“What’s your name?” I ask the moment I open my eyes and see her there, comforted by her presence even though I don’t know who she is.

“Stella.”

One day I wake to see her sitting near my bed as she always is, the sunlight glinting off her hair, and I don’t have to ask her name because I remember.

I’ve been taking the antidote for nine days.

Stella keeps me company, and every day the things we talk about make more sense.

“Where’s Zane, Stella?”

She shakes her head. “He’s not sure you want to see him.”

“Why?”

“You don’t remember everything yet.”

“No.”

“Wait, okay? Wait until you do.”

“Okay.”

I’ve been taking the antidote for twelve days.

Stella is my constant companion, and I speak to an older lady named Alice who has kind eyes and a gentle smile. No one wants to call her what she is—a therapist, a psychiatrist.

Jerricka Solis has poisoned us all.

We speak about rape and what Ash made me do. I remember almost everything now. The shame, the pain, the men who did it to me...and their names.

As we walk through the woods behind the bed and breakfast Zane bought to give me privacy to convalesce in, I talk to her about Gage and the way he handled me. “Your call, every time,”he would say, always giving me control. He didn’t care about what those men did to me, he loved me anyway.

I miss him.

I take the last dose of the antidote on day fourteen.

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