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“Oh!” she cried, appearing from around a large display. “I didn’t mean to scare you!” she professed, lifting her arms like I was pointing a gun at her and not a piece of wood.
I sagged, relief making me dizzy. “Chalene! Oh my gosh,” I said, pressing a hand into my chest. “You scared the crap out of me.”
“I’m sorry. I thought you heard me call out a minute ago.”
I shook my head. I hadn’t heard that. “I heard you playing ‘Dies Irae’ on the piano,” I said, gesturing across the room.
She wrinkled her nose. “Is that a song we’ve practiced?”
I groaned. Chalene really was not that great at piano. I couldn’t understand why she tried so hard and why she wanted to play in the Westbrook orchestra next year so badly. Even with all the lessons I’d been giving her, I still didn’t think she was at the level of talent required for a program like Westbrook’s.
“Well, no. But I thought maybe you’d practiced it on your own time,” I said. “‘Day of Wrath’”—I used the more common term that song was known by—“is a very popular tune.”
“I didn’t play the piano,” she said. “I just got here.”
I literally heard that song playing. Was this it? Was this my punishment for punking Ben about the flute?
I studied her a moment, wondering if Ben somehow put her up to this. If this was some elaborate joke. But he wouldn’t call her. He didn’t know her. He didn’t have her number. She was just a high school student her rich parents were paying me to tutor.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
Her demeanor changed, eyes going toward her shoes. “I came to see you.”
Alarm skittered along my already frayed nerves. “How did you know where I was?”
“You told me. In your text,” she explained, finally looking up at me but her eyes still not quite meeting mine. “You couldn’t do a lesson today because you were at your other job.”
Right. And I’d told her before that my other job was here.
I shifted my weight onto the crutch beneath my arm and looked longingly at the one I’d dropped. I could bend down and pick it up, but for some reason, the urge to stay upright was so strong I was near paralyzed with it. “So what did you need? Some new sheet music or—”
“I’m so sorry!” she burst out, completely cutting me off.
I stopped talking, eyes widening into disks, and I stared at her without blinking. I started to tremble. My temples began to throb. The muscles in my neck locked up like vises, so tense that electric jolts of pain shot up into the back of my skull.
The stitches in my head throbbed, suddenly so tight they felt stretched to the point of bursting.
“Why would you be sorry,” I asked, voice a mere whisper as I teetered unsteadily on one leg.
“This is all my fault,” she exclaimed, rushing forward.
Her sudden movement upended my precarious stance on the crutch, and I fell backward, my tailbone hitting the floor with a thud so heavy it vibrated my bones.
Grunting, I pushed up into a sitting position as Chalene rushed over, towering over me from her feet.
It felt like a trigger being pulled in my mind. One minute, I was hunched on the floor, and the next, I wasn’t even in the music store anymore. I was suspended somewhere between present and past, memory and current day.
The gaps still missing in my mind, the blank spaces that left me to wonder who, what, why, and how, flooded my brain like a tsunami, flickering so fast I could scarcely grab on to one before it was gone and another was in its place.
I relived that entire night in the span of just a few seconds, all the missing pieces locking into place as I finally remembered.
Remembered exactly what happened the night of my accident.
Except it wasn’t an accident.
It had been intentional.
When the current memories finished pummeling me, my entire body was weak and shaking. Sweat dotted my hairline, my bra stuck uncomfortably to my back, and hair stuck to my lips like I’d been thrashing my head around.
