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“You and Bryce arranged that day as my Christmas present. Josh Elliot met us at Bloom’s Farm. I thought we were just going to the Christmas Craft Market, but he did a fifteen-minute photo shoot.” She smiled, and a chuckle escaped. “We might look happy, but it was about eight degrees outside, and everyone kept grumbling. You had to put on your bossy voice and whip us all into shape. “
I felt a tear spill over my eyelid.
“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. Here.” She rushed to my side and reached for the frame. “I’ll put it away for now.”
I shook my head. “You don’t have to do that. I’m fine.”
Mom wrapped an arm around my shoulder, and I leaned into her soft embrace. She kissed the side of my head. I might have been thirty-one years old, but sometimes a person just needed their mom.
“I can’t imagine how hard this must be for you. We'll take it one day at a time.”
I sniffed, trying to pull myself together, and nodded.
One day at a time. I could do that.
I looked around the room again, my eyes finding more tiny details that had shifted in the six months I didn’t remember.
It was like nothing had changed.
At the same time, it was as though absolutely everything had changed.
ChapterThree
JAKE
Ifidgeted with the Rubik’s Cube in my hand as I listened to Bryce deliver our annual training on traffic safety. My feet were resting on the table in front of me as I leaned back in the uncomfortable chairs of the community room we used for training.
“Sadly, just last week a firefighter in Ohio was struck and killed by a vehicle while working the scene of an accident.”
My fingers faltered, but I didn’t move my gaze from the toy.
Car accident.
Monica’s accident.
Monica’s memory.
Our relationship.
Everything these days brought me back to Monica. And as much as I was trying to be in the game and pay attention to my life, the whole thing seemed kind of pointless without her. It was probably crazy, since I’d spent fifteen years with her being nothing more than my friend’s little sister and only four months with her as someone special to me. But the light that she’d brought into my life was suddenly gone and everything seemed especially dim.
“Jake?”
I glanced up and found Bryce’s eyes on me, his eyebrows raised. “Huh?”
He gave me a confused look, threaded with disappointment, and turned his attention to the other side of the room. “What about you, Nate?”
Nathan Wells, Captain of the B shift, was apparently better at paying attention than me, because he chimed right in with the correct answer to the question I hadn’t even heard Bryce ask.
I straightened in my chair, lowering my feet to the ground and attempting to refocus, but it was a lost cause.
Bryce ended the class by reminding us all to take the online quiz during our next shift. The off-duty crews shuffled out of the training room with jokes about sleeping for a week and inappropriate comments about who they’d be sharing that bed with.
I stayed where I was, unable to snap out of the fog that had defined my days since I left the hospital. I thought the worst part was waiting in the hospital for Monica to wake up, but all the while I was there praying with every ounce of my strength that she would be okay, I never considered the possibility that when she woke up she would be totally fine, except for the part where she didn’t remember anything about our relationship.
“Hey, man, what’s going on?”
I registered that Bryce was standing next to me, but I didn’t move to acknowledge him at all.
