Page 66 of The Fall
“Dr. Jackson? No, no, you should be talking to my team doctor. You should be talking to… talking to…”
Tampa’s team doctor. I see her face. I hear her voice. Her name, what’s her name?
Dr. Granholm’s expression is placid. He studies me closely. “Dr. Jacksonisyour team physician. He’s being kept apprised of your situation.”
Dr. Jacksonwasmy team physician when I played for the Orcas. But I’m not in Vancouver and I’m not with the Orcas anymore. I’m in Tampa, with the Mutineers. With Blair.
The Orcas, and Dr. Jackson, that was?—
Before.
“My phone. I need my phone.” Shit, is my phone at the bottom of the bay? Did they get it out when they pulled me from the water? From the limo? The limo. The crash. Blair. Fuck. Whereishe? Did anyone else survive? I can’t think, can’t think. “Did they get my phone out of the limo? When they pulled us from the water? Did anyone else—” I choke on my words.
I need my phone. I need to see Blair’s face, hear his voice, read his texts.
The nurse pulls out a bag of my belongings, filled with my undershirt, leggings, socks, wallet, and—my phone. But it’s myold phone, from a lifetime ago. Frombefore. Before Blair. Before us.
This can’t be right. It’s a relic from another time, another life. My fingers, slippery with sweat, fumble to unlock it. Please, God, please let me turn this on and see Blair’s smile.
“Password.”
For a second, my mind blanks. The four digits of my PIN come slowly, like dredging them from a nightmare. I stab them into the screen, and when the phone lights up, the ground cracks beneath me.
No. The background is wrong. There’s no picture of Blair and me smiling at the camera, our foreheads touching.
My thumbs fumble for the photo folder. My chest heaves; I can’t pull in enough oxygen. The photos blink open?—
There’s nothing. No Blair. No Hayes. No Mutineers. No celebration. No goofy selfies with the team, no pictures of Hayes and Erin’s backyard, no beaming smiles under the Florida sun. I swipe hard, clumsy, and my vision blurs, rivers of tears distorting everything.
Nothing makes sense. My thoughts are unraveling into threads, useless, meaningless.
I frantically search for any sign of the life I remember, any trace of Blair, of Hayes, of my team, my family. I don’tunderstand?—
Because there’s nothing. No photos, no texts, no evidence at all. All I find are old shots from Vancouver. Slate-colored beaches, a bottle of lonely beer on the rickety patio table on the balcony of my old apartment. These are the deadened remnants of a life I left behind, a life I hated.
“What’s happening?” I rasp. “What thefuckis going on? Where is he?”
Dr. Granholm’s lips are moving but I can’t hear over the rush in my ears. Someplace inside me is broken and bleeding. Mytear-swollen eyes home in on the date on my phone. What thefuck?—
It’s March 22, the same day I woke up in Blair’s bed, tangled in Blair’s sheets with his scent on my skin, with a year’s worth of missing memories. It was March 22 two weeks ago?—
And it was March 22 one year exactly from today when I woke up in Blair’s bed, one year from the date I’m seeing on my phone. But?—
The date leers at me. Understanding seeps in, slow and merciless. I woke up in Blair’s bed with a year ripped from my memory, but that was a year that, apparently, never happened.
“No,” I whisper. “No, no, no.”
Everything I knew, everything I felt—it’s evaporating, and I’m on the edge of something too perilous, too broken, to confront. This can’t be happening. It can’t. All of it, gone. A year. A whole year, gone, erased.Again. My life, gone.
It was real, I know it was real, I felt it, I lived it, Ilovedit?—
A scream tears from me. I can’t stop it, can’t contain the wreckage inside me. “No!Where is he?”
“Torey—”
I’m nothing but agony, ripping through every nerve, shredding every thought. “Tell me where the fuck he is!” Without Blair… God, without Blair, what am I? Who am I? Every inch of me is washed in terror. I can’t go back to the Torey I was before him.
Dr. Granholm’s face swims in front of me. Sounds splinter; nothing connects. It’s all fragments, shards of reality that won’t fit together. The phone slips out of my hands. I’m falling, plunging into an abyss with no bottom.
