Page 4 of Taking Care of the Target

A voice came through, distorted as if it’d been filtered through a robot. “Did you need something?”

Cassie opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. Her throat felt as though she’d recently chugged sand, so dry that simplytryingto talk scratched it. Finally she managed a weak, “Help.”

“Wait? Is that room 305?” It sounded like the woman was talking to someone else, and then the noise went away all together.

About a minute later, a plump lady in scrubs walked in. Her eyes went wide. “You’re awake. I’ll get the doctor right away.”

Before Cassie could say anything, the nurse charged out the door.

What seemed like an eternity later, she reappeared with a skinny man who looked like he should still be in college and definitely not already practicing medicine.

He identified himself and then started in on the questions. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“I was working as a waitress,” Cassie croaked out, then paused to take a drink from the cup the nurse handed her. After chugging the whole thing down, speaking only mildly hurt her throat. “At a place called the Barbecue Pit.”

“Is that here in New Jersey?” he asked.

She lowered her eyebrows, her brain going as fuzzy as her vision. “New Jersey? It was in Colorado. Are you saying… I’m in New Jersey?”

The doctor nodded.

“What am I doing in New Jersey?”

A crease formed in his forehead, and he gave her this pity-filled look that only increased the sinking sensation in her chest. “Seems you’ve lost part of your memory. Sometimes it comes back, and sometimes it doesn’t.”

“How long have I been in the hospital?”

“About a week,” he said. “You didn’t have any identification. Do you remember your name?”

“It’s Cassandra Dalton.”

The doctor lifted his clipboard, wrote something down, and then glanced back at her. “Who do you need us to contact, Cassandra?”

Cassie shook her head. “No one. I don’t have anyone.”

“Family?” he asked.

“Gone.” Such a short word, but it was heavy and brought a fresh wave of pain that had nothing to do with her physical injuries.

“Friends?”

“Nope.” Cassie lifted her bruised arms; they didn’t even look like they belonged to her, which only deepened the strange, detached feeling twisting through her. “So what happened to me? Why am I here?”

“You were hit by a truck. Luckily, it stopped before it rolled over you, but you hit the pavement hard enough to lose consciousness. You were comatose when the paramedics brought you in, and we did everything we could to get the swelling on your brain down.”

The phrases “hit by a truck” and “swelling on your brain” tumbled over and over, giving her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“It was pretty bad there for a while,” the doctor continued, “but the odds of making a full physical recovery look good. Why don’t you try to remember as much as you can? Start out with your earliest memory and work your way up. I’ll call the police and inform them of your name, and they’ll track down your address and fill in the facts you might not remember.”

The doctor and the nurse exited the room, leaving Cassie to process all the information, and quite frankly, she failed; it was way too much to take in. So she closed her eyes and focused on the doctor’s last request.Hmm, earliest memory.

She didn’t remember Mom dying in a car crash because she’d been a baby at the time, but she knew it’d happened. From her earliest memories, it had always been just her and Dad. Being shy got in the way of having a lot of friends. Senior year, when she was slowly making a few, as well as starting a relationship with her first boyfriend, Dad got sick, and she retreated to herself again. Prom, BFFs, boys, name brand clothing—everything seemed so unimportant after that. Even her classes, which had always been her strong point.

After a two-year fight with cancer, it went from just her and Dad to just her.

Tears filled her eyes, and she blinked them away.Before I relive all of that, I need to figure out which point of life I’m in now.

After high-school graduation, when Dad’s condition was quickly deteriorating and the bills kept piling up, she took a job at the Barbecue Pit, one of the few restaurants in her tiny hometown of Parker. She scrimped and saved, promising herself she’d scrape enough money together to go to college, just like Dad had always wanted.

---