Page 103 of Midnight Valentine
Tears are still sliding down my cheeks, but I can no longer feel them. I no longer know how to blink, or move, or even breathe.
“Cass—”
“I’m not your dead fucking husband!” Theo roars in my dead husband’s voice.
The acid bite of bile forces its way up my throat. I swallow it down, shivering uncontrollably. The air has gone so cold, we could be in a crypt. I say hoarsely, “Why are you lying?”
All the light leaves Theo’s eyes. They go dead. It’s like watching storm shades being slammed over windows. “This is why you want me? Because you think I’m him?”
Listening to those words in that voice causes a fissure in my brain. I feel it—a quick, hard snap—like ice cracking underfoot.
I jolt to my feet, right there on the mattress. Clutching the sheet to my chest, I draw a breath so ragged, it sounds like a death rattle. My voice is even worse, as hollow and eerie as if I’m speaking from beyond the grave.
“I don’t think you’re him—you are him. And you’re you. You’re both, and you’re perfect.”
“Stop it,” he says flatly.
“No. Why did you stop talking after your accident, Theo? Why haven’t you spoken a word to anyone in five years?”
He answers without hesitation. “My vocal cords were damaged from smoke inhalation in the accident. My voice changed, and I hated how strange it sounded.”
A hysterical laugh tears from my throat. “Smoke damage? Is that how they explained it to you at Acadia? Because I think we both know it’s something else.”
“Megan, stop—”
“Did you ever see me before I moved here, Theo?”
All the blood drains from his face. He’s as white as the sheet I’m clutching in my fist. He whispers, “I…I had a brain injury, Megan. My hallucinations…they’re not real.”
“Then why did you ask Coop how you could remember someone you’d never met?”
Theo swallows, briefly closing his eyes. In a rasp, he says, “My doctor said I couldn’t get well unless I started talking again, unless I forced myself to. I didn’t want to do it for the first time in front of everyone last night at the party—”
“How did you know me, Theo?”
With a strangled cry, Theo runs ov
er to his clothes, left in a pile on the floor on his side of the bed. He yanks on his jeans, shirt, and jacket while I sink farther and farther into the black delirium rising like floodwaters inside my mind.
They drugged him. Those sons of bitches at Acadia, that soulless bastard Dr. Garner—they fed him drugs, told him he’s schizophrenic, and brainwashed him into believing a miracle was mental illness.
I’m not having it. I’m not having any of it. This is my soul mate, and I won’t let anyone take him away from me.
Not again.
I shout, “You’re afraid of yellow balloons!”
Theo flinches as if I’ve punched him in the gut. Backing away slowly toward the bedroom door, he stares at me as I give witness to the truth of who he is at the absolute top of my lungs.
“Your mother’s name was Mary! Your father was Dan! When you were ten years old, you got a beagle and named him Snoopy!”
Theo slaps his hands over his ears. Shaking his head and still moving backward, his face crumples, and he starts to cry.
“You loved hot dogs and bear claws and Mad Max movies! You photographed lightning strikes and painted landscapes in oils! You proposed to me in the same place we first made love when we were sixteen, under the blooming acacia at our favorite spot in the bend in the Salt River! You had a tattoo of Matthew verse seven across your back, because you were a seeker who believed that the only way to get at the truth was to knock on every door until you found it!”
His sob tears a hole in my heart, but I have to keep going. I can’t stop, no matter how much he might want me to. I have to break through this wall of denial once and for all.
I step down from the mattress and stalk toward him, one step forward for each stumbling step he takes away, my body racked with tremors, my voice rising to a scream.
