A Forever Christmas(14)

“Hysterical amnesia,” Dan told her. Her eyes shifted toward him, waiting—hoping—for answers. Any answers. The desperation inside her needed something to hold on to. “It happens after an accident sometimes. Victims block things out until they can handle processing them.”

“Victims,” she repeated.

Was that what she was? A victim? Did she feel like a victim? she wondered, trying to examine her feelings. Nothing came to her. She honestly didn’t know. What did victims feel like?

“Am I all right?” she asked the man in the white lab jacket.

“So far,” he replied cautiously. “But Gabe is going to take you to the hospital, to make sure.”

“Gabe?” she repeated. The name meant nothing to her. Should it have? “Who’s Gabe?”

“That would be me.” Gabe raised his hand a little, drawing her attention to him as he gave her his most reassuring smile.





Chapter Four



She shifted her eyes from one man to the other and then back again, hoping for something. A glimmer of a memory, an elusive flash of recognition, anything.

But there was nothing. Not so much as a hint of a hint.

“When is my memory going to come back?” she asked the doctor.

Right now, she felt like an empty vessel. She had no memories to access, no thoughts to fill her head. Nothing but a vast wasteland stretched before her, leading nowhere, involving nothing. The loneliness of that was almost unbearable.

“That’s hard to say,” he told her honestly. “It varies from person to person. You could remember everything in a few hours, or—”

“Or?” she prompted, battling back an ever-growing sense of desperation. Was it purely due to her wanting to remember?

Or did it involve something she wanted to forget? She just didn’t know.

“Or you could never remember. But that’s rather rare,” he added.

“But it does happen,” she pressed, not wanting him to sugarcoat anything.

She did her best to find a way to brace herself for never getting beyond this moment right now, and yet how could she since she had nothing to draw upon?

“Rarely,” Gabe emphasized, speaking up. He noticed the look that Dan gave him. Probably wondering where I got my medical degree, Gabe thought. But he just couldn’t let that devastated expression on her face continue. “No point in dwelling on possible worst-case scenarios. If it turns out to be that way, you’ve gained nothing by making yourself miserable,” he explained. “And if it doesn’t, well, then you’ve wasted a lot of precious time anticipating something that turned out not to happen.”

A pragmatic thought rose to the fore—was she like that at heart? Or did this reaction just naturally evolve from her form of resignation? Again, nothing answered her silent query.

“From where I’m standing,” she told Gabe, “looks to me like I’ve got nothing but time to waste.”

“You’re not going to be wasting time,” Gabe told the blonde cheerfully. “You’re coming with me, remember? To Pine Ridge Memorial to see what they have to say about all this.”

It felt as if her head was spinning around in endless circles and she just wasn’t making any headway. Both Gabe and the doctor seemed to be nice, but were they? And why were they so willing to go out of their way for her like this?

“Do I know either one of you?” she asked, looking from one face to another again.

But her reaction to either man was just the same as it had been a moment earlier. Neither one looked the least bit familiar, woke up nothing in her depleted memory banks.

“No, you don’t,” Dan answered for both of them.

Even in her present limited state, she knew that just didn’t make any sense. “Then why are you doing this? Why are you taking me to a hospital in another town?”

“Because there is no hospital here,” Dan replied matter-of-factly.

“Because you need help,” Gabe told her almost at the same time.

It still didn’t make sense to her. “And that’s enough?” she questioned, puzzled.

Something told her that she wasn’t accustomed to selfless people. That everyone was always out for their own special interests.

“It is for me,” Gabe told her. “And for the doc,” he added, nodding at the other man.

Damn but the way this woman looked at him made him want to leap tall buildings in a single bound and change the course of mighty rivers, just like the comic-book hero of long ago. The very thought worried him. And yet, he couldn’t quite make himself back off. Couldn’t just turn her over to either Alma or Joe.