Her eyes fixate on me, unblinking, for several uncomfortably long moments that remind me way too much of the coma-stare.

“Ember?”

Her eyes blink rapidly. “Tw—Twenty-one? Age?”

“Yes.”

She sucks her bottom lip between her teeth.

“How old am I?” she whispers, her eyes shimmery dark oceans of fear.

“You’re thirty-six,” I reply softly.

“No.” She shakes her head. “That’s not true.”

She grabs the bar on the side of the bed and stares around the room in terror. “I’m not. I’m not. I’m not,” she chants as tears stream down her cheeks.

“It’s okay. Please don’t be scared...”

“How many longs was I asleep?”

When the doctor informed her how long she’d been in a coma, she appeared totally unfazed at the time. But now—now it seems to have suddenly sunk in.

“Almost eight years.”

She gasps, choking on her tears. “Eight years?” she squeaks.

Nodding, I scoot up the bed closer to her and cover her shaking hands with mine. “It’s a long time, I know. A lot’s changed.” I gently wipe her damp cheek with my thumb, and she leans slightly into my touch. “People. Things. Life. But we’re still here, and we still love you. We’re all going to help you catch up.”

She watches my lips as I talk, weighing every word.

Walking that fine line of trusting a total stranger—a world of strangers—with her life.

With her past and her future.

And most importantly, her present.

The way she’s looking at my lips stirs an ache to kiss her. Just one soft kiss—the magic band-aid we’ve used a million times when nothing else could ease fear, stress, or pain.

One kiss would fix so much for me. It would breathe life into my dying heart and give me hope that there’s still an… us.

But that same kiss won’t fix anything for her.

I resort to squeezing her hands in mine, and she squeezes back, wrapping her fingers around my thumb.

“I’m so scared.” Her gaze sweeps over all the photographs on the wall. “My life is just...gone. I’m a big nothing. I have a daughter I don’t know. A sister. What about parents?”

I let out a low breath. “That’s complicated.”

“What is?”

“Your parents.”

“Why? Are—are they dead?”

“No, nothing like that. They’re alive.”

But you’re dead to them.

“Then why complicated?”

“We can talk about all that another time. When you’re feeling better.”

She narrows her eyes to slits and pulls her hands out from under mine, extinguishing the tiny amount of trust we’d built.

“Please talk now. You can’t pick what I know.”

I run my hand through my hair and stifle a sigh. I really didn’t want to go down this long-detoured road so soon. Or ever, really.

“You’re right. I have no right to keep things from you. I just don’t want to upset you. It’s kinda my thing...to protect you and make sure you’re happy.” I wink at her and rest my hand on her leg just below her knee.

She shifts her eyes to my hand. Is she looking at the wedding band I never take off? Or is she annoyed?

Maybe not annoyed. Uninterested.

My words. My touch. The affection in my voice. The adoration she must see in my eyes—all have no effect on her.

She seems completely immune to me.

“I’m going to be upset a lot, mister. You can’t stop it.”

Mister. Not Ash or honey or sweetheart or love or Valentine.

“I want to stop it, though. I don’t want you to ever feel scared or lonely or sad.”

“Where are my parents?” She pins me with an impatient stare.

I rub my beard, searching for the right words to explain the situation, but there aren’t any right words because all of it is so wrong. It always has been. “You haven’t seen your parents in a long time. They came to the hospital the day of your accident. They’ve visited four times since then, all during the first year. Before that, you hadn’t seen them since you were fifteen years old. You were twenty-eight when you had the accident.”

“But...” She rubs her forehead and looks toward the wall of photographs. “Why?”

“Your parents are old-fashioned. They were very strict when you were young. When you got pregnant with Kenzi, they were mad. They wanted you to have an abortion, but you refused. We refused. They wanted to send you away to some relative in California. But instead, you came to live with my family, and we kept the baby. They never forgave you, and you never forgave them, either.”

The confusion on her face is utterly heartbreaking, and I wish her asshole parents were here to see the damage they’ve done to her. But they’ve always hidden from reality, pretending she was dead rather than accepting her and our child. Or, God forbid, visiting her in this hospital over the years.

“I don’t understand. Why would they do that?”

“Because you were only fifteen when we got pregnant.”

Her mouth gapes open, and she stares at me like I’m a monster. “No.” She shakes her head and moves her body away from mine with such a look of disgust, I’m surprised she doesn’t kick me off the edge of her bed. “I don’t believe that.”