Page 48 of The Fall Before Flight

Leo waits for me to continue, but I don’t. I know now why I felt an inexplicable bond between us. Not a magical connection or simply attraction, after all, but buried memory.

We have a history, Leo and I. He was the Psychiatric Fellow in charge of my case at UCLA. Diagnosed me within hours. Discharged me three days later. Met with Jameson and my father and explained what was happening. That they shouldn’t push me to remember. That I needed support and normalcy. That the mind had a way of healing itself.

Or, in my case, breaking itself.

“Though it’s not unheard of for a patient to have both retrograde and anterograde amnesia post-trauma, your situation was unique. In most cases, memory of events prior to the trauma come back, while those after the trauma rarely do.”

I understand what he’s getting at even though I don’t want to. “So you think I had some crazy form of denial, not amnesia.”

“Yes, in a sense. The phenomenon is called confabulation. The accident triggered an exaggerated stress response. Coupled with your head injury, it’s likely your memory retrieval was blocked by an adaptive response to avoid stress.”

“I love it when you talk smart to me.”

His lips quirk. A tiny twitch. I hate that the sight of it warms the cold place inside me. Hate hate hate how his effect on me keeps growing day by day.

“You lied to me,” I say mildly, staring out the window behind his desk.

“You weren’t ready to hear the truth.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I pause, chewing my lip. “I still don’t understand why I blacked you out, too.”

He shrugs. “The mind is a mysterious domain. It could be because you associated me with the trauma of taking the pain pills.”

I frown and shift in my chair.

“It makes you uncomfortable thinking about the attempt, doesn’t it?”

“Well, yes,” I snap. “I really didn’t want to die. I didn’t think of it like that. I just wanted to wake up. I really thought that was the solution. Shit… I sound crazy.”

“You shouldn’t have been discharged from the hospital,” he says gravely. “I’m sorry you weren’t properly diagnosed, Amelia.”

I shake my head. “It’s not their fault. I probably looked and sounded normal. I’m good at hiding the crazy.”

“You’re not crazy,” he says, then pauses. “Well, maybe ten percent or so.”

I glance sharply at him. His eyes twinkle at me. Fuck. A smile teases my lips, the first genuine one in days.

His eyebrows lift. “Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about why the accident wasn’t your fault, shall we?”

I groan.

Then I laugh.

Smartass.

“Did you hear?” asks Kinsey.

“Hear what?”

She glances over her shoulder, footsteps never faltering on the path of the labyrinth. We’ve been at it for an hour. I’m counting the seconds until she has to leave for her three o’clock therapy session.

“We’re getting new blood today. They’re intaking him right now. Apparently he’s a real mess.”

“Great.”

She stops and I almost careen into her back. “You could at least try to sound excited.”

My eyebrows shoot up. “Why should I be excited? Whoever he is, he’s probably in a world of pain. None of us want to be here—you do realize that, right?”

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