Page 13 of Desire Me
Paramedics had kept the woman stable enough on the short trip to the hospital, where Leah, her staff, and Dr. Rogers had taken over. One of the good guys. Leah hadn’t worried about the woman’s chances with Rogers treating her. No, what haunted her was the total isolation of the patient that morning. She’d been alone when hit, according to witnesses, run down and left for dead with a massive head injury, her body covered in cuts and contusions. No ID. No purse. No jewelry. Nothing to indicate who she was or who might know her. Even the labels in her clothing were gone.
The cops who took over the investigation later told Leah they had been unable to get a tag on the SUV that hit her. The nearest camera had been blocked by a cargo van, and no witnesses had remembered the license number. Though they’d canvassed the area, no one recognized the woman either. Which, given her injuries, wasn’t surprising, but a still captured from a traffic camera a couple of blocks away hadn’t helped the identification process. The woman was a mystery, period, full stop. She’d been unconscious, at first from injuries and then from a medically induced coma to give the swelling time to come down. Only then could they assess any permanent damage. She’d been shipped up to the ICU.
And that should have been the end.
Except Leah hadn’t been able to forget. And few days later, she’d heard through the grapevine that the woman had woken with total retrograde amnesia.
Not only was complete amnesia rare, making the patient fascinating from a medical point of view, but Leah couldn’t help identifying with the woman, stuck in her ICU bed, alone, no one to give her answers or comfort her as she started to heal. Something about it felt much like Leah’s ordeal with Brooke, when she’d been alone with no one to help her find her kidnapped daughter. Until Remi came along. He’d walked beside her, held her, found Brooke for her, and helped get her back. Leah couldn’t fight the urge to help this woman somehow, if only to honor the way she’d been helped when she needed it.
And so her trip to the ICU.
The elevator dinged her arrival, and the doors slid open to allow her to exit.
“Back again?” Martha asked, a teasing smile quirking her pink lips. The nurse was getting used to seeing Leah arrive after her normal daytime shift.
“Can’t stay away.” Leah leaned against the counter at the nurses’ station. “Any change?”
Martha shook her head. “She’s been moved to the step-down unit”—a definite sign of physical progress—“but she still won’t know you.”
Leah had visited twice already, and the second time the patient hadn’t remembered meeting her before. It wasn’t unusual for patients with amnesia to have problems not only with prior memories, but making new ones for a while, especially if the amnesia was caused by a traumatic brain injury. How much of this particular case was TBI and how much was emotional trauma, they couldn’t know. They simply had to wait—for the woman’s brain to heal, for her memories to return, or for someone to claim her. The cops had collected her fingerprints, but they hadn’t shared any new developments with the hospital staff, which likely meant the prints weren’t on file, at least in Atlanta.
For a second Leah considered collecting prints to share with Eli, Remi’s brother, to see what he might dig up in his expansive database, but doing so would violate the patient’s privacy. Not that such a little thing as privacy would stop Eli. The Agozi family had its own ideas about right and wrong. But Leah couldn’t let go of the ethics of her profession as easily. Not that she wouldn’t do it if it meant keeping the patient safe, but there hadn’t been any evidence of danger either, so…
“She’ll remember me eventually,” Leah said, praying her words were true. There had been occasional stories about people losing their complete memory permanently, but those were the sensational ones. The majority of patients recovered at least some memories, although Leah doubted the woman would ever recall her accident. That much they could be thankful for, she guessed. Who wanted to remember the agony of being hit head-on?
“I like your optimism.” Martha winked. “If you want to go in, we have a few minutes before dinner trays come around.”
Leah headed down the long green corridor, her tennis shoes squeaking on the seen-better-days linoleum tile. Her nose hairs had long since fried to nothing from the harsh antiseptic used throughout the hospital, but that didn’t mean she no longer noticed it. She wrinkled her nose as she passed the ICU cubicles and moved onto the step-down unit her Jane Doe patient was now housed in.
Well, not exactlyhers—nurses weren’t supposed to get possessive over patients—but this patient…
The glass door to cubicle 1092 stood partway open. “Hello?”
Silence. Leah pushed through quietly, knowing the patient might be getting some much-needed sleep before shift change and a vitals check forced her awake. But when she peeked through the white drape that provided what little privacy could be had in the hospital, it wasn’t to find a snoozing patient. No, the woman’s big brown eyes were wide open, the whites clearly visible from Leah’s position a few feet away. She was partially sitting up, white sheet and blanket pulled up to her stomach, her light-blue gown somehow highlighting the fact that her olive complexion held a sickly gray tinge. Leah gave what she hoped was a reassuring smile to the obviously frightened woman. “May I come in?”
That gaze dropped to her uniform, one eyebrow developing the faintest arch.
“I know; I’m a nurse, so why am I not barging in, right?” Leah did just that, moving carefully so as not to startle the patient. “I’m not here in an official capacity. You probably don’t remember me. I’m Leah.”
If she hadn’t been hyperaware of the woman’s expression, she would have missed the aborted attempt to speak before Leah said her name aloud. As it was, the slight movement caught her eye—Leah had spent years vigilant for the slightest hint that her brother and the mob he worked for would find her, and details kept you alive, so she’d noted them constantly. Every single one. This one told her the woman might not remember her previous visits, but something was definitely tugging at the patient’s mind. Leah cheered inside at the sign of physical progress even as the rest of the woman’s expression registered.
The fact that her lips were now a tight line, as if suppressing whatever had wanted to escape, told Leah she wasn’t ready to admit the truth. Given how terrified she must be, for good reasons or not, Leah couldn’t blame her.
Some semblance of her memory was returning, but the woman was too frightened to admit it.
Leah leaned against a blank space on the wall about halfway up the bed. “I was the nurse who treated you when you arrived at Fulton County Memorial,” she said, hoping the name would give the patient some clue as to her surroundings without her having to ask. She nodded toward the bandage covering a shaved patch of the woman’s hair. “You were pretty banged up. I’m so glad to see you’re awake and healing.”
The mention of her injuries sent tension through the woman, her fists clutching the ball of blanket and sheet against her belly, and Leah softened with sympathy. What must this all be like for her—not knowing her name, not knowing anyone she came in contact with, not knowing why she was here and what had happened to her?
“I’ve come by a couple of times to check on you,” she continued. “Give you some information. I hope that eases your mind, even though I know right now you can’t remember it well.” She shifted her hips, trying to ease the strain of being on her feet for most of the past ten hours. “We’ve given all your information to the police, and they took your fingerprints.” She nodded toward the woman’s hands. “They will search for them in their databases, search missing persons reports. They will let you know the minute they find out anything about your identity. In the meantime your injuries are improving.” She gave a quick rundown of those injuries for the patient’s benefit. The woman sat, wide-eyed and silent, until Leah trailed off to a halt.
This didn’t seem to be helping.
“You can ask me questions, you know. I’ll answer them as best I can.”
The room was quiet but for the sounds of the equipment. The woman’s mouth opened, closed, then opened again. Leah held her breath. Would she finally speak?
“When will I be released?”
