Page 101 of Until You Found Me

“I lived two towns over. I’d never been here before, but he must have. An hour, maybe two, that was far enough for him. He must have been so fucking desperate to get rid of me he couldn’t even find a proper place to—” She shakes her head in disbelief. “He wouldn’t get to keep the insurance money if I didn’t stay dead.”

Her emotions are blunted by the onslaught of trauma, turning her words monotone when they shouldn’t be. She isn’t sure she wants to know what all of this will feel like tomorrow, next week, or next month, once her dull edges turn sharp again.

Logan squints. “Insurance?”

“Starting a whole new life is expensive. He told me as much. Made me sign the policy so many years ago that there’s no way anyone would suspect now.”

Her survival did so much more than risk Nick’s freedom, it risked all the money he collected and the new woman on his arm, the life he wanted badly enough that he’d fake her suicide to get it, and then attempt murder again when she foiled that plan. He must have noticed her lack of recognition when they bumped into each other in town, but couldn’t risk her remembering.

“Fucking piece of shit,” Logan mutters. “I swear I—”

“He already got what he deserved, and I don’t want to think about him anymore. I can’t.” That is easier said than done. Inevitable technicalities lie ahead, all connected to the man haunting her nightmares. How does she stop thinking about him when the police will bring him to her doorstep due to the investigation, the news will bring him to her TV, and her mind conjures him up the moment she falls asleep? “I want to focus on the future as much as I can. Turns out, having the past back isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

Logan goes quiet, a question in his eyes that he doesn’t speak until she prompts him.

“What is it?”

“Can I ask how it feels now?” he replies carefully. “Having it all back. You don’t have to answer.”

How does it feel? How does it feel? Even after the drugs wore off, she can’t find a proper answer. It doesn’t feel the way she thought it would, is the short version, but he’s earned more than that.

Tessa gathers a bleached white blanket into her lap, rubbing the frayed threads between her fingers as she speaks. “Youknow how all the parts of your life fit together without any effort to keep them there? Everything blends. There are no spaces between each event, no barriers between your memories?”

He nods, and she continues.

“It wasn’t like that for me. There was before the road and after the road, and they couldn’t mingle. They couldn’t blend. I felt like there had to be a different me in the past and I worried that she would absorb who I became without her.”

“Did she?”

“No. I’m not two people. I never was. All those moments in the past that I couldn’t reach have merged with the new ones I’ve made here, with you, like they were never separate at all. It’s like someone turned on the blender and all the contents have finally made a smoothie instead of being individual, whole fruits sitting on top of each other.”

A fractured chasm kept her past and present apart and now those pathways in her brain have grabbed their proper ends and sewn themselves up again.

She reaches out across their beds until he slips his hand into her waiting palm. “I’m still me, Logan. I promise.”

“I know you are. I can see it. I’m sorry that I ever doubted, even a little.”

“Don’t be. This is a weird situation, right?”

He huffs out a sound of mild amusement. “Is it ever.”

“But we’re on the other side of it now, and I love you even more than I did a day ago, and that was a high bar.”

He offers her a slow, cat-like blink. “Love you, too.”

The nurses pushed their beds together after she tried to exit hers before the drugs fully wore off. She takes advantage of that proximity now and leans over to press her lipsto his. It’s a dry kiss, chapped by the hospital air, but they linger anyway, noses nuzzling and foreheads connected when they part.

“Me and you, we’ll be just fine,” he says. “I’m real glad you’re a smoothie now.”

She snorts. “Okay, maybe that wasn’t the deepest comparison I could have gone with.”

She has never been more certain that she’s exactly where she needs to be. Right here with him.

* * *

On their first night home after surgery, they curl up naked in bed because she can’t bear to be apart from him, even through their thin layers of clothes. There is a visceral need deep in her bones to feel his bare skin pressed to hers. They can’t take it any further, not that she would be in the mood. Everything is sore from the tips of her hair down to her toes and every inhale she takes tugs at her stitches.

The doctor told them to wait four to six weeks before having sex and right now she imagines they’ll make it the full six without any problem. She grabbed his phone off the hospital nightstand though, jokingly creating an alert in his calendar for exactly four weeks into the future, as if they’d forget.

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