Page 86 of Begin Again
“Oh yes!” Joseph’s face splits with a bright smile. He begins ushering us toward the stairs at the other end of the hallway. “Xavier has done some great work in there.”
Xavier? Who the hell is Xavier?
I hang back a few steps. “Do you mind if I use the restroom? I’ll be right out.”
“Course, darlin’. Right through that door.” Joseph points at the door over my shoulder at the furthest end of the hallway.
I smile in thanks and walk to the bathroom, but don’t go in, gripping the handle until their voices disappear and I hear the front door close. When I see them through the window overlooking the front of the house, I go to the bedroom door directly to the left of the bathroom. When I turn the handle, I’m happy to find it unlocked. Joseph wouldn’t let us in this room earlier, saying he wanted to respect the privacy of his guest, and I knew I had to get in there. It may be my only chance to figure out what in the hell has been going on.
The door swings open, smooth as butter, and I smile, because I know it’s something Nick is a stickler for. If there is so much as a creak in a hinge, it will be gone the same day. While I never thought it was a big deal, it came in handy with a sleeping toddler.
The room looks like the other three guest rooms—nothing special, nothing out of place. Only two things in the room indicate someone has been staying here: the folded pajamas hidden behind the pillow—something Nick always did—and the desk full of sketches, notebooks, and a file. A medical file. The name on the tag readsJohn Doein scribbled penmanship. I flip it open to find a medical chart and a police report, neither filledwith much information. I scan the file and find a scribbled note on the last page of the medical chart:
No memory of the incident or how he arrived in Bezer. Patient found by Bill Wyatt and Joseph Blackwood on April 10, 2028. Patient has amnesia. Definite cause is unknown, appears to be some kind of trauma to the head with a deep laceration, along with bruised ribs and a sprained ankle.
“Oh my God,” I whisper.
Amnesia.
Nick has amnesia. He doesn’t remember me or our life together. He doesn’t remember our daughter, our home…He doesn’t remember anything.
There’s a Post-it Note inside the file with five facts in my husband’s handwriting. The fifth one makes my heart ache:No one has come looking.
Closing the file shuffles a few drawings, and one catches my eye. I gasp, dropping it as soon as I free the drawing from underneath the others. Tears prick my eyes when I see the sketch of our home in Winchester—the house I built long before Nick and I were together. The house I had worked hard to pay for because I wanted something of my own without feeling like it had been handed to me because of my name. The one Nick moved into after we got married in New York and turned it from mine to ours, making it feel less like a house and more like a home. A tear drops down my cheek, falling onto the paper, and I smile.
Maybe he didn’t remember everything, but he remembered something…
And I could work with that.
When I find the others in the barn, they’re gathered in the stable area behind doors that look like they’ve been recently redone. “I’m sorry, I got caught up looking at the paintings in the hallway,” I say.
Not a total lie, Ihadbeen admiring them earlier when we passed by them.
“Nice, aren’t they?” Joseph asks, a sense of pride in his words.
“Did you do them?”
“Oh no!” He chuckles. “No, I’m no artist. My mother painted those. She had dementia, but painting gave her a way to express herself even when she couldn’texpressherself.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“Oh, don’t be, sweetie. Mother lived a good life. Happy till the day she went to be with the good Lord.”
“Shall we?” Jace extends his hand farther into the barn. He and Ben are getting antsy, but Nick isn’t back from town yet…What’s the rush?
“Oh, yes, of course. Let’s start with the arena,” Joseph says, leading us down the main stretch. He begins in the tack room, recently renovated byXavier. After bragging about the new indoor shower, Joseph pulls open a rolling door at the end of the long hall, revealing a riding arena where three barrels sit in the open space.
“You been barrel racing, Joe?” Ben chuckles.
“Charlie,” Joseph corrects him. “Finally got her back on the horse last year after her accident, thanks to Xavier. Remember, she competed at the Blossom Festival this past weekend and won. I’m not surprised, she just needed a little shove in the right direction.”
“She and Xavier close?” Jace asks the question I want to know.
“It’s a bit complicated.” Joseph laughs, scratching his beard. “I wouldn’t say they’re close, but definitely something goin’ on there.”
Not exactly the answer I wanted to hear. If he’s built a life here, how am I supposed to convince him to come home? What if he doesn’t want to come home?
“But enough about all that,” Joseph says as we walk out of the arena and back down the hallway. Two horses stand at the gates of their stalls, heads protruding through the open spaces. One of them is a chestnut brown with a white star extending down the bridge of its nose. The other reminds me of the horse Elena fell in love with on the property next to us. Not long after we moved to Haven for those ten months, our neighbors (if you can call them that when they live over a mile down the road) invited us for dinner. Their horses were out in the fenced portion of a pasture near the house and Elena was enthralled when she saw them. This one is a little darker than the one next door, its coat as dark as the shadows that move in the night, the kind of black that protrudes through darkness with each movement. The nameplate under him readsShadow.
