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He was an old teenage wound she had no interest in reopening.

The only thing Aster Bishop knew about her was how to make her miserable.

She would not cry in front of him. She’d promised herself that years ago—more years than she remembered, evidently.

Molly would never know if Bishop planned to answer, because her nurse came bustling back in with far too much optimism in her bouncing gait.

“Got to get you over to imaging,” she said, unlocking the wheel brake on Molly’s bed. She turned to Bishop. “It’ll be a couple of hours if you’re planning on waiting. There’s—”

“He’s not waiting,” Molly cut in. “He’s leaving.”

When she was returned to her room, Molly resigned herself to doing exactly what her doctors asked of her. She slept.

When she woke, Alannah sat at her bedside.

Molly blinked, drinking in a welcome, familiar face. Alannah’s hair was still buzzed close to her head, as it had been since they were eighteen and she’d used Simon’s clippers to cut it all off because “who had the time?” She had the same dark, almost photoshop-perfect skin; the same wide, long-lashed eyes that balanced an impossible line between open kindness and subtle suspicion. Molly suddenly felt like weeping.

“Hey,” Alannah whispered. “I brought you a change of clothes. And some cupcakes. I’ve been calling them concussion cakes, but I guess that’s not really accurate. ‘Amnesia cakes’ doesn’t really have the same ring. And I’ve got no idea how soon is too soon. Still in the hospital feels like maybe too soon, doesn’t it?” She dragged in a breath and visibly refocused herself. “How are you feeling?”

Groggy. Tired. Grieving. Maybe a little inappropriately amused. And so very, very confused. Molly’s face must have said enough. Alannah scooted closer to the bed, chair scraping against laminate floor. Carefully, she reached out and held Molly’s hand.

“I spoke to your nurse on my way in. They’re working on your discharge paperwork right now. It . . . looked like a lot,” Alannah said. “But apart from your head, of course, they said you’re doing really well.”

Molly felt a little unsteady. This was Alannah, who’d been one of Molly’s best friends since their freshman year of high school.

Alannah, who on closer study, didn’t quite look exactly how Molly remembered her. In between the basic facts of her appearance, Molly couldn’t deny the presence of six lost years in her face, in her posture. Alannah was the same, but she was also different. And Molly couldn’t make sense of that.

“You look . . .” Molly began, not really knowing how to go on.

“Exhausted. I look exhausted,” Alannah supplied with a forced laugh. “My best friend is in the hospital, and I have two children under the age of four. I can’t remember the last time I slept.” She gave Molly’s hand a squeeze. “I’ve been so worried about you.”

Molly stared, her world a top spinning too close to a table’s edge. “Children?”

Alannah’s eyes widened. “I wasn’t . . . don’t worry about that for now. I’m so sorry. We’re supposed to reintroduce information slowly. Try not to overwhelm you. I guess emotional distress can worsen physical symptoms.”

It was too big a thing to brush aside.

“You have children? That’s . . . new.” Molly’s thoughts lurched. “Or not that new, I guess.” The world might have been insistent that Molly was currently pushing twenty-eight, but everything in her head still felt like she was in her early twenties. The reality of having families and children still felt light-years away, decisions still unmade. “Wait, whose are they? Are they Roy’s—your kids, I mean?”

They’d had a plan, the four of them. Molly and Roy, childhood best friends, plus Simon and Alannah, the twins they’d met at the snobby boarding school that viewed them all as less than. Molly and Roy had been scholarship kids, Molly for academics, Roy for baseball. Alannah and Simon’s dad taught English, and their mom worked in administration; scholarship and faculty kids were evidently the same sort of unworthy to Laburnum legacy students.

In the end, it made perfect sense when Roy fell for Alannah and Molly fell for Simon. They were meant to have joint proposals, weddings, honeymoons, lives.

Alannah laughed, and it felt like the first genuine sound to enter Molly’s hospital room in days. “Yes, they’re Roy’s. Well, he had a part in it at least. Takes two to tango and all that. Jessa will tell you she’s four, but she’s still three. And Thomas is a little over ten months. You were my maid of honor, of course.”

Alannah smiled. Despite the tiredness woven into her features, her joy was undeniable, obvious in an internalized, radiating way.

A strange new grief swallowed Molly whole. “It doesn’t feel real.”

“I know,” Alannah said before grimacing. “Well, I don’t. How could I? But I’m here. I came because I heard things didn’t go well with . . . Anyway, we thought it would be best if I was the one to give you the basics about your life.”

“Before I have to go live it?”

Alannah pressed her lips together. “Pretty much.”

A nurse stepped through the curtain, holding what looked like an entire filing cabinet’s worth of information. Molly declined a final verbal review of her paperwork, insistent that she was very capable of reading it on her own, and pointedly ignoring that she was not meant to read for long periods of time for the next several weeks. There were certain immutable facts about her person that not even brain damage could derail, and reading was one of them.

She glanced down at her name, or what was supposed to be her name, printed on her papers.