I'm back to pacing in the hall, only this time Laura and Mikey are here with me. Running their hands through their hair, biting their nails. I'm afraid Mikey might bite his whole finger off, but luckily all his appendages are intact when the doctor comes back out into the hall.

"Evelyn is suffering from short term memory loss," she explains before I even have a chance to ask what's going on.

"How short do you mean? What can she remember? She recognizes me, right?" I ask desperately.

"Yes, she remembers you," she nods. "We gave her paper and a pen to communicate with. She'll have to work with a speech therapist, but her speech will come back with time and so will her memory."

Mikey, Laura, and I look at each other before I take the lead and enter the room. Eve's bed is in a sitting up position, she doesn't have to crane her neck to look at us. Her eyes immediately light up when she sees Mikey and I, but she seems to be ignoring Laura. We all sit down in chairs that have been pulled around her bed. No one knows what to say first.

Quickly, she grabs the notepad and pen lying next to her and scribbles some messy words, then flashes the paper at us:

I don't know what I did but I'm so sorry.

Instead of breaking down in tears, I take a deep breath and calmly explain to her what happened. "It's not your fault, Evie. You got in a car accident with your friends, Raven, Krash, and Ryder. Do you remember them?"

Eve furrows her eyebrows. I have so many questions, she writes.

"We have time," I tell her.

She takes a long time to scrawl her questions on a new page, a look of intense concentration on her face, like it's taking all her energy to get her thoughts on paper. I can't imagine how disorganized they must be in her head right now.

(In order of importance)

1. Where is Emerald/is she okay?

2. How long have I been here?

3. Am I still going to live in Rhode Island?

4. Since when am I hanging out with Krash and Raven again?

5. Where is Zero?

6. Who is Ryder?

So, I start by telling her how she left New Jersey as planned on March 27th with her social worker, left from there with her friends on July 3rd, and it's now July 18th. She spent about three months in Rhode Island. Emerald is at home and safe, and as soon as she finds out Eve is awake, her mom will be bringing her here so they can be reunited.

I glance at Laura to see if she wants to take it from there, but she doesn't seem to have anything to say, so I go on. Hoping that something will jog her memory, I tell her any and all details I can remember from our phone calls throughout the months. About school, her classes and her grades, the places she hung out at with her friends, but leaving out the bad parts that it might be best that she's forgotten for now.

Eve puts a hand up weakly to halt me.

"You okay, Evie?" I ask, stopping in the middle of my story about how she told off some girls for speaking about her behind her back in French.

She nods distractedly and writes, Is Ryder here? Can I meet him?

"Well, it's like three in the morning, Eve. Your friends are probably asleep," I say apologetically.

She looks down, disappointed.

I reach and rest a hand over one of her's. "I think you've gotten an overload of information for tonight and you need some rest," I tell her gently, not wanting to disappoint her some more. But it's obvious she's tired.

Dad I was just resting for two weeks, she writes, stifling a yawn.

"Eve, you're exhausted. We can talk all you want tomorrow. Frank and Ray are gonna come visit you, and Raven and Ryder can come see you too." I tell her all this while trying my best to sound excited despite my own exhaustion, like when you try and make a little kid enthusiastic about something they don't really want to do.

What about Krash and Zero?? She scribbles quickly, concern filling her tired eyes.

Mikey and I look at each other, then back at Eve. "Um, Krash isn't doing so well, Evie," I say gently. "I'm sorry, Darling."

She mouths the word, "Oh."

"And Zero wasn't with you guys," I add. "Raven hasn't mentioned him."

She mouths the word, "Oh," one more time.

A silence falls over the room, but Mikey quickly breaks it before it gets tense and awkward. He stands from the chair and leans over, hugging Eve so carefully it's like he thinks she might crumble in his arms.

"I'm gonna get back to the hotel, Kiddo," he says. "It was so nice seeing you."

Eve smiles a genuine smile I've missed seeing so much it makes my heart swell. I need to hold back tears. I've been doing that a lot recently.

Laura leaves immediately after Mikey to get back to her own hotel room. I wonder if she'll dare show her face here tomorrow, come back to a room full of people who have a grudge against her that they'll probably never let go of. She says, "Goodnight, Evelyn. I'm so glad to see you're alright," then scurries out of the room.

But the thing is, we don't know if she's alright. We don't know when her memories will restore, or if they'll even restore completely. She can't talk yet, and it'll take a lot of work to retrain her brain in that area. And no one's even thought of getting her out of bed yet. What if she never walks again? What if her speech never develops the same again? Of course, those are things I'll let my mind spiral around later, when she's asleep and I'm inevitably lying awake.

Before crawling onto the uncomfortable cot and at least trying to get to sleep, I tell Eve, "Lindsey just texted me. She's coming to visit you in the morning and she's bringing Bandit!"

Eve's eyes widen. She quickly grabs her notepad and writes, Bandit???

"Yeah, Darling, that's your sister," I say fondly, concealing the painful pang in my chest at the realization that the birth of Bandit is yet another detail of the last three months she's forgotten. "She was born in May. On the twenty-seventh."

She smiles at the thought of meeting her baby sister for the first time, but her face quickly turns sad. Her lip quivers, her eyes fill with tears, and immediately I'm at her side. She tries to talk, "I c-c— I ca—" but when she can't get any words out, cries harder.

"It's okay, Evie, take your time. Write it down."

With a shaking hand, she writes slowly, I can't believe I don't remember my own sister being born.

I put an arm around her carefully and say softly, "It'll come back, just give it some time."

She nods and leans her head on my shoulder, and instead of going back to my cot, I stay with her, half falling off her hospital bed, but just happy to be by her side.

• • •

I think Dad thinks I've gone to sleep, the way I'm leaning heavily against his shoulder, breathing deeply. But I'm forcing myself to stay awake. I'm scared to fall asleep. The dreams I'd had while in that coma were terrifying, scarily realistic, vivid, confusing. Fragments of my childhood I'd pushed down deep resurfaced, inserted themselves into later memories, mixed themselves with the present, fit themselves into a hypothetical future of loss, betrayal, rejection, and broken trust.

Not only that, but the usual nightmare that bore a scary resemblance to what really happened early on the fourth of July kept repeating itself. Now I know maybe my reality was replaying itself, over and over, a sort of torture. The screeching breaks that didn't break quite quickly enough, the jolt forward as we collided with the other vehicle, the way the car scraped against the road and only stopped when it slammed against the barrier with the shattering of glass, keeping us from falling off the bridge.

Of course, I don't remember all that happening, per se, but the way it happened in my dreams. With Dad behind the wheel, or even myself behind the wheel, with Emerald next to me, or anyone else that I love. Always being taken away from me, ripped away from me, too soon. Me, always being left alone in the end.

Somehow, I can tell he's still awake, and I wonder if that also means that I, myself, am not as good at pretending to sleep as I thought. I guess he probably knows I've been lying awake this entire time. Long enough now that the sun must be about ready to come up.

Do I say something? A past me would never dream of it. A past me would've bottled up all my thoughts, all this pain, would've let myself drown in it until I couldn't breathe because of that weight on my chest I could never seem to shake off. A past me would've thought he didn't even care. But he does care. He's stuck by my side the past two weeks, fought for me to come back home, never stopped calling me, thinking about me, loving me despite the time and distance.

Finally, I decide to say something. "D-Da—" Then I remember that I can't really say something. I know the words I want to say, I can form the sentence in my mind, but my mouth won't cooperate. It's like there's a disconnect between my brain and my mouth.

"Can't sleep?" Dad asks gently, but wide awake as I expected.

I shake my head.

"Do you need anything?" he asks. "Water? Food? Bathroom?"

I shake my head again, and point at my notepad and pen left on the chair beside the bed. He hands me the items, then switches on a light, and I try and get to work on organizing my thoughts on paper. I don't want to leave anything out, I don't want to lie, but to say everything would be to write a novel at this point.

Despite the running thoughts in my mind, I end up staring at a blank piece of paper for a long time. Dad never rushes me, though. And when I finally do write something down, it's a simple phrase that explains my sleeplessness.

Two weeks of nightmares.

When he reads the words, he pulls me closer to himself, albeit carefully. I'm still attached to a couple machines, one of which is producing a rhythmic beeping that was annoying at first, but then I had to tune out just so that it wouldn't lull me to sleep. There's also still an IV needle in the back of my hand I can imagine he's been trying his best to ignore.

Dad says, "Would it help to tell me about them?"

I write, Same old, but more real now. And other stuff mixed in.

"Other stuff?"

Memories from when I was little that I forgot about. And stuff that hasn't even happened but it felt so real.

"It wasn't real, Eve," he tries to reassure me. But of course I know that. And he knows I know that. But what else are you supposed to say in this situation? And besides, I'm not giving him much to work with.

I go on writing, working up the courage and beginning to fill in the blanks. Me failing school, never going to college, not having a future.

"Eve, you're so determined in everything you do, sometimes to a fault, you know. Of course you have a future ahead of you," he says, squeezing my hand. "And you're so smart, and talented— don't even try to argue with me on that— I have no doubt in my mind that you're gonna do great things."

Em leaving me because something suddenly changes.

"I don't think there's anything you could do that would make that girl love you any less," Dad says simply. "Her mom told me, she's so excited to see you tomorrow."

You not wanting me anymore, hurting me, leaving me, me being alone again.

"That definitely, definitely, will not happen. I can't even put into words how much I've missed you, and how worried I was, and how relieved I was when you woke up," he says without missing a beat. "I love you so fucking much, Kiddo, and I'm never gonna leave you."