Page 53 of Now or Never

“Enough of this,” she said, cutting him off and holding her hands up as if she were warding off a demon. “Your turn.”

It took Adam a few minutes to recover, but he finally cleared his throat and composed himself.

“I got in a bad car accident when I was twenty-two.”

Chelsea stared on, waiting, hooked. Wondering whether that was all he was going to give her to go on. Finally, he started speaking again.

“I moved to Toronto after high school for university and started dating a girl whose family was connected to mine. We left a party one night. We’d all been drinking, but my friend insisted he was okay to drive. Obviously, he wasn’t, because he smashed into the corner of a building. I was in the front passenger seat and hit it square on. Everyone else in the car was fine.”

“What happened?”

“I was in pretty awful shape. They put me in a coma for three months. They didn’t think I was going to live. I almost lost my right eye. But I made it through, started my recovery, moved back to Mapleton, and haven’t left since.”

“What about school?”

Adam shook his head. “They diagnosed me with a traumatic brain injury. I had to give up on school. I couldn’t keep up with the courses.”

“And your girlfriend?”

Adam took a moment before answering. “She broke up with me. It seemed for a while that I would never recover at all from the brain injury. It took me six months of speech therapy just to talk coherently again.”

Chelsea gaped at him. A million thoughts raced through her head, but the first one was,That fucking bitch!

“Anyway, I don’t blame her. She had to look out for herself. We were all so young, and she . . .”

“What?” Chelsea asked, on the literal edge of her seat.

“She wanted to get married and have kids. With me. And I . . .”

Another long pause.

“You what?” Chelsea asked, feeling like she was going to explode.

“I have a low life expectancy,” he finally got out. “I’ll be lucky if I make it to my forties. They said I’d have a stroke and die in the first few years after the accident. It’s a miracle I’ve lived this long.”

Chelsea stared at him in shock for a long moment. She started sentences in her head repeatedly, not able to come up with something to say.

Adam cleared his throat. “Anyway, that’s why I steer clear of kids, and girlfriends, and wives. I’d just end up dying and leaving them all alone.”

All alone.

Chelsea didn’t know what to say. She knew what it was like to be left all alone. She hated watching Ben grow up without his dad.

Silence dropped between them like a curtain coming down on a stage until Adam cleared his throat.

“So, wedding.”

She had still said nothing. Wondered whether she was no longer capable of speech.

Adam reached a hand up to her shoulder. “It’s okay, Chelsea. It was a long time ago. I’ve come to terms with it.”

Chelsea nodded, trying to come to terms with it herself.

“Chelsea?”

She was still trying to form a thought, trying to stop the tears that were pricking her eyes, when Jasper’s voice broke through her thoughts. She blinked up to see him standing on the other side of the porch, looking at Adam with a murderous stare.

sixteen

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