Page 28 of When Hearts Remember

The same snippets again. I’ve experienced these episodes a few times since I woke up, but I can’t make sense of them.Nightmare? Memories?

“You okay?” Taylor pulls up a chair and sits down, her back against the large picture window in the long-term rehabilitation unit in Manhattan Memorial, my new home after I came out of my coma.

“Just the strange flashes again.”

“The doctor said don’t try too hard. You’ll hurt yourself. Let things come back on their own.”

“I know. But I don’t want to sit there and do nothing. There’s got to be something Icando.”

Taylor laughs. “Man, I never thought I’d be the one lecturing someone on patience.”

She grins, her nose piercing, a red heart—something that’s definitely the adult Taylor—glints under the lights. The last memory I had of her was when she was twelve and I was sixteen. She just started at IPA and was all arms and legs, skinny as a rail.

It still shocks me every time when she walks through the door—and she visits twice a week, rain or shine.

She’s no longer twelve. She’s twenty-four and a principal dancer for the top ballet company in the country, ABTC. And I’m not sixteen anymore. I’m twenty-eight—caught in limbo where I don’t feel like a teenager, but can’t quite accept I’m almost thirty.

Dr. Riordan, my neurologist, told me my body still matured while I slept, my brain too—quietly finishing what time had already started. I may not remember the years I lost, but something in me feels older.

But still, I was robbed.

Taylor ticks off her fingers. “Remember the rules: go to your therapy sessions, don’t force yourself to remember or it’ll backfire. I want to tell you more but—”

“We have to follow the doctor’s orders,” I finish for her.

My family and friends were instructed to avoid discussing my missing memories with me, as it may cause additional stress on my brain and also create false memories. So other than basics—my age, my major in college, how I broke up with Dayton—they didn’t tell me much.

“My brother always told me we’re the hardest critic of ourselves,” Taylor says.

Her words. They feel…familiar.I look at her. Thick, raven hair piled up in a high bun. Luminous gray eyes giving me a sense of déjà vu, but not because they’re her eyes.

I just can’t place it.

“Your brother? Which one?”

She’s an Anderson now—another development I’ve learned recently. Lil’ Tay and her older sister, Grace, are Linus’s daughters from a passionate love affair long after his wife died. But unfortunately, the Peyton sisters’ mom also passed away tragically a few years ago.

She shrugs. “Ethan.”

I tense up. Images of the mysterious, brooding man who ran to my bedside after I woke up flash through my mind.

Nope. Not thinking of him.

Taylor narrows her eyes.

“What?” I look away, not wanting her to read me.

“You know I’m going to pry it out of you. You’re upset about something.”

I sigh. “I should be thankful and happy. It’s a miracle. Nothing else can explain it. But I feel so useless.”

I punch my right thigh. The sensations are there but muted, like the pins and needles I’d feel if I sat on my leg for too long and suddenly got up.

“My body isn’t my own anymore, and I have no memories of the four years before the accident. It’s just memories, but I’ve lost so much already, Tay.”

Apparently, I was found submerged in the Hudson when I was twenty after a car accident on a rainy day. I suffered multiple broken ribs, a punctured spleen and liver, a traumatic brain injury, and almost drowned.

Lucky for me, an anonymous Good Samaritan fished me out of the river before my clock ran out and called 911 from a pay phone. They placed me in a medically induced coma after a bunch of surgeries, but I never came out of it.

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