She leaned over and kissed him. As soon as he pulled her closer, she sat back up.

“None of that, remember?” She was reminding herself as much as him. “Go back to sleep. I’m here.”

He fell asleep again a few moments later, still holding on to Maddie’s hand. She’d had enough crying for the night, so she switched over to her favorite soothing British mystery series. Somewhere in between the hot vicar discovering the murder and solving it, she fell asleep.

She woke up with a jerk from a dream about watching Theo getting chased around and around a track, with everyone but her laughing. She got up to go to the bathroom and try to shake the sick, trapped feeling of the dream away.

When she slid back in bed next to Theo, he stirred.

“Maddie?” he said in a thick voice. His eyes were still closed.

“I’m here. Are you okay?”

He reached out for her hand, just like he’d done at the hospital, and she slid her fingers in his.

“Mmmhmm. Thank you for taking care of me.”

She stroked his head with her free hand.

“I just want you to be okay.”

He closed his eyes and smiled.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too,” Maddie said.

She froze.

Why had he said that?

Why had she said that?

She could tell by his regular breathing that he was back asleep within seconds.

She didn’t think she’d ever sleep again.

Chapter Eighteen

WHEN THEO WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING, HE WINCED. HIS HEAD HURT like hell.

He turned over and opened his eyes. Maddie was awake in bed next to him.

Oh. The rally. The rally he’d devoted so much time to this summer so it would be perfect. The rally that had been a disaster because of him.

He sat up and rubbed his head.

“Please tell me I just had a horrible nightmare and that’s why my head hurts.”

Maddie looked as exhausted as he felt.

“Did you forget again? Yesterday, at the rally—”

He sighed and reached for his glasses.

“No, I remembered. I was just hoping I’d remembered wrong.” He put his hand over his eyes. “Am I allowed to take something for my headache? And am I allowed to have coffee? Please say yes.”

Maddie swung her legs out of bed and stood up.

“You can have both Tylenol and coffee. I’ll be right back.”

Theo pulled himself out of bed and to the bathroom. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and shuddered. He had a vague memory of being happy last night on the way home from the hospital; he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why now. He’d worked so hard on that rally, and he’d done everything wrong. And now the whole world knew it.

He stumbled into the kitchen. Maddie was grinding coffee beans. The noise assaulted him.

“Do you need help with the coffee?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“You should be lying down. I can handle this.”

He walked toward the cabinet.

“I’m not an invalid. I can help.” He turned away from the window; the sun streaming through the windows hurt his eyes. Maddie just looked at him.

“Yeah, okay, fine, I probably need a little more rest in a darkened room. But I hate to just leave you here to make the coffee for me.”

She filled up his electric kettle and set it on to boil.

“You can leave me here. Go to the living room if you want a change of scenery from your bedroom. I closed the shades.”

When he got into the living room, he saw his plastic hospital bag sitting by the couch and opened it. He pulled out his destroyed clothes and shook his head. He held up the shirt, neatly cut in half right next to the buttons, and sighed. He’d loved that shirt. And that tie. He knew emergency workers had to do what they had to do, but he wished they could have at least just untied the tie.

What else was in here? Oh, there was his phone! Maybe he had an email or something telling him what happened at the rally after he’d gotten hit over the head. Had they continued? Had anyone else been hurt? He could look up press coverage from yesterday; that would give him more information.

What if there were pictures of him knocked out on the ground? There must be video. How humiliating.

He plugged the phone into the charger he kept in his living room and unlocked it.

He didn’t think he’d ever had that many new text messages in his life. He even had more new emails than that day his boss had accidentally sworn on live TV. They were from everyone he’d worked with in the past ten years, and possibly everyone he’d ever met. He felt like such a phony for getting so much sympathy—this whole thing was all his fault. He was the one who’d made sure the rally was in Berkeley, and he’d been so eager to pretend the likelihood of a big protest away, he hadn’t at all adequately prepared for one. He’d barely even briefed the police chief, when that should have been one of his top priorities. An actual plan could have stopped these guys long before they got violent and fucked everything up.

This must have been deadly to the campaign. This was definitely deadly to Theo’s hopes of moving up the political ladder.

He couldn’t concentrate very well on the screen; he hated that he couldn’t think clearly. He gave up and forwarded any email that seemed important to his assistant. He switched over to his bulging text messages. He opened the series of texts from his mom, one of which read in part “If you EVER do this to me again . . .” when he heard Maddie’s footsteps and looked up.

“Oh thank God, coffee,” he said.

She looked down at the phone in his hands.

“WHAT do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

He looked back down at the phone.

“Looking at my mom’s texts. She seems like she’s ready to kill me, but I get the impression that Ben managed to talk her down some.”

Maddie set the coffee down on the table and snatched the phone out of his hands.

“You’re not supposed to be looking at your phone! Did you not remember what I said about no screens?”

He actually hadn’t remembered that part.

He narrowed his eyes at her.

“No screens? What do you mean, ‘screens’?” He reached for his phone, but she stepped out of the way.

“No phone. No computer and no TV, either. No screens and no reading.”

He picked up the coffee and took a sip. He needed some caffeine to help him deal with this.

“You’re serious? But how am I supposed to do my job? Aside from everything else, I need to know, on a scale from one to one hundred, just how much I ruined things for my boss, the children of California, and also me, Theo Stephens.” He thought for a second. “Maybe not in that order.”

She sat down next to him.

“You can’t look any of those things up, and I hate to break it to you, but you won’t be doing your job at all for a week or so. Maybe two.”

He dropped his head into his hands.

“A week? Two? But I have to fix this. Or at least, do what I can to fix it. I want to go back in time and hit myself on the head for not preparing for something like this. I was so obsessed with making everything perfect, I didn’t think about the things I couldn’t control. If I had, I would have planned for them!”

Maddie took a sip from her own cup of coffee and kept his phone firmly in her grasp.

“They kept going with the rally afterward. Alexa said everything stayed mostly on track.”

Now that she said that, he had a vague memory of someone telling him that in the hospital.

“Okay.” He tried to think about what that would be like, how the rally would be after he’d been knocked to the ground, but somehow he couldn’t picture it. Why couldn’t he think? “Maybe if I just read one article? Or you could read them to me?”

Maddie shook her head.

“You can talk to Alexa. She’ll give you an update. You already look worse than you did when you woke up. I can’t imagine the news will make you feel better.”

He sighed.

“Okay, fine, I won’t look at it. Can you just let me charge it? I want to be able to answer when my mom calls, and I’m sure she will today. And I can’t talk to Alexa without a charged phone.”

She pursed her lips but handed the phone back to him. He stuck it in the charger and put it facedown on the end table.

“I made toast,” Maddie said. “Can I trust you in here while I go get it?”

She was right that he felt worse than he did when he woke up. Maybe some of that was from his phone.

Such betrayal from the device he’d loved so much.

“I promise. I won’t even touch it.”

When she came back a few minutes later with toast for both of them, he picked up a piece.

“Thank you for taking care of me,” he said.

She stared at him with a frozen look on her face.

“You’re welcome,” she said finally.

He ate two slices of toast and closed his eyes. Maybe he would just rest his eyes for a minute; it was so bright in here.

Maddie was only halfway through a piece of toast when she realized Theo was sound asleep on her shoulder.

Did he remember what he’d said? He must not remember.

Or maybe he was just pretending to not remember?

Why had he said that to her?