Page 39 of Midnight Between Us
“I’m supposed to keep him away from you,” Simone says, her voice threading through the static in my head.“Hidden until they figure out why he was zipped up and left for dead in the trunk of a car.”
Left for dead?
The words hit harder than anything else she could have said.
The walls around me start to blur—too white, too clean, sterile in a way that makes my skin crawl.The knowledge that I almost didn’t make it because ...fuck.The truth clings to the back of my throat, mixing with the sour churn of something uglier rising inside me.
I stare at the ceiling like it might give me something to hold onto.A sign.A memory.A reason.Anything.Why are they trying to kill me?Who?
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Once more, slower this time, like that might help.
Keir.
The name pulses under my skin now, a beat I can’t silence.It doesn’t feel foreign.It doesn’t belong to someone else.It fits, sliding into the hollow space inside me as if it’s always been there, just waiting to be called back to life.
My jaw locks tightly.Every muscle fights the mechanical rhythm of the oxygen tube strapped to my face.Machines beep in a frantic pattern beside me, like they’re struggling to keep up with the way my body wants to fight.
I’m Keir.
And Simone isn’t just a doctor trying to save a stranger.
She knows me.
She knows exactly what I’ve lost—even if I don’t remember it yet.
My intuition tells me that she’s the girl from the church.The one by the lake.The voice that dragged me back from the edge.
And she lied.
She fucking lied.
Or maybe ...maybe she didn’t.
Maybe she hid the truth so I wouldn’t destroy myself with it.Maybe she was protecting something—me, even.But from what?
From who?
Pain ricochets through my leg, sudden and brutal, tearing a gasp from my lungs.But that’s not what undoes me—it’s the way confusion floods in, thick and suffocating.
Then the door clicks open.
She steps inside.
Simone.
She looks as if she hasn’t slept in days.Not just tired—haunted.That mouth is set in the same tight line she wears when she’s barely holding herself together.It’s as if she’s seconds away from breaking.
She doesn’t know I heard her.
Doesn’t realize I remember now.Not everything but a lot.
Behind her, the hospital staff wheels in equipment, unhooking me from the monitors.As if I’m just another name on a clipboard, not the person she used to know me as before.
But this isn’t just another day.
