Leonora Harper pushed the book cart through the stacks in the library, the squeaky wheel on it making her ears ache. She’d taken the entire thing apart, doused it in WD-40, and put it back together, but it kept on squeaking.
A patron looked up from one of the computers and gave the cart a nasty look. Or maybe the look was meant for her. Some people took the library’s golden rule of silence to cultlike lengths.
Her first instinct was to shoot the patron a dirty look of her own. She wasn’t any happier about the noise, but she couldn’t carry all these books by hand as she reshelved them. Maybe he could cut her a little slack?
But Leonora’s first instincts couldn’t be trusted anymore. Instead, she gave the patron an apologetic smile. He didn’t return it.
Leonora made her way to the nonfiction section, pushing past the shelves until she came to the biographies. She tilted her head until the rows of books to her right appeared in her vision. She knew she looked odd when she did that, but better to look silly than to not see.
Her eye was fine of course. Lots of her was completely and totally fine and fully healed from the accident.
It was her brain that was spotty, and that made all the difference. As far as anyone could tell, her right eye worked exactly as it should. But there was a huge blank spot in her right field of vision. She didn’t know there was a blank spot, or at least she didn’t consciously know. Things would appear randomly in her vision that hadn’t been there before, practically jumping out at her. She’d held her right arm permanently crooked in front of her for the first few months of her rehabilitation, ready to catch any of those jumping objects should they try to smack into her.
She didn’t have to hold her arm up any longer—she could sense when things were there by the way sound echoed off them, by the subtle changes in air pressure.
The reason she couldn’t see them was because the primary visual cortex—aka, V1, which is what the doctor usually called it—on the left side of her brain didn’t work correctly anymore. And her brain didn’t know it wasn’t working, so it assumed everything she saw was everything that was there.
Life was tricky when your brain was so, so certain the world was one way and it was really another. Luckily, the brain was also pretty adaptable. And so was Leonora.
She continued down the stacks, her head still at that odd angle, searching for the Js. Before she could find them though, her phone buzzed. She let herself roll her eyes since no one was there to see.
Mom. And sure enough, the text message read, Are you okay? Love, Mama.
Leonora got at least three of those a day. Sometimes she imagined sending back Nope. I’m dead. Sometimes she imagined never answering, just letting the silence between them stretch on forever.
She never did that though. Whatever irritation she might feel at her mother’s hovering, justified or not, had no bearing on whether or not she’d answer. The guilt she felt for everything her parents had sacrificed in her recovery did though.
I’m just fine. Talk to you when I get home.
She slipped the phone back into her pocket and took up her search again. When she found the spot she was looking for, she slid the book back into its home. Then she inched down the aisle a little farther, the cart wheel squeaking the entire time.
She searched for the Ps, going past the Ls and Ms… Oh, and now she was in the Ts. She stopped, straightened up. She must have missed the Ps. She tilted her head, trying to bring the shelves back into view—
Something sprang into being on her right.
Her arm locked instinctively into position, elbow bent and hand spread wide to ward off whatever was coming at her.
But the specter didn’t come any closer. Slowly she lowered her arm and tilted her head to bring the mysterious thing into view.
It was Josh.
She blinked at him, changed the angle of her neck, but he remained there. She waited for an emotion to come—the anger everyone assumed she felt for him, the revulsion her family felt—but only blank curiosity trickled in.
He looked different—leaner, more gray hair, sadder somehow. He’d been handsome before but in a young way, like his face hadn’t quite settled yet. Now there were lines around his deep blue eyes, and he was rangy when he’d once been lean. His beechnut-brown hair was lighter too—but that was the gray sprinkled in.
She couldn’t be certain if his appearance had truly changed or if it was only her brain telling her more lies. Nothing familiar unfurled within her as she studied him. Not love, or sadness, or even resignation.
“Hello, Leonora.”
His voice sounded the same as in her memories, so perhaps his appearance really was that altered. When people saw her now, people who hadn’t seen her since before the accident, they told her she looked great. She knew they weren’t being truthful. It’d be unkind to say they were lying, but when she looked at pictures of herself before and her face in the mirror now… Well, her features hadn’t traveled toward better.
And that wasn’t her brain lying to her.
Her brain wasn’t lying to her now. It was him, and he was as changed as she. And there came a hint of… something. Hot and sharp all at once, like flame forged into a blade, nestled just under her heart.
She forced her arm back to her side, her elbow reluctant to unbend for some reason. “Hello.”
Strangely enough, she hadn’t imagined this moment in any detail. She’d known it would happen—of course he would seek her out once he was home—but until he was in the part of her vision that she knew was real and true and not the blank space filled in by a malfunctioning V1, she hadn’t quite come to grips with it. Maybe that was why she didn’t know how to feel.
“Is it okay that I’m here?” He held a straw cowboy hat loosely in his hand and wore a long-sleeved shirt and some jeans. He looked ready to do ranch work. Which was interesting since as far she knew, he’d never had a job in his life. Not a real one.
Speaking of which: “I’m working.”
The library was not the place to have this meeting, not with all her coworkers and patrons looking on. With her injury and her reputation before the accident, she couldn’t risk even a single incident here.
“I mean…” He swallowed hard and twisted his wrist so that his hat rolled through the air. “Is it okay that I spoke to you? Do you want me not to talk to you?”
Along with a blank space in her imagination where this meeting was, was her emotional reaction to it. But seeing him approach her so hesitantly, all of him twisted with apology… That hint of something in her chest bubbled and burned, as corrosive as acid. She almost didn’t recognize it, it had been so long since she’d experienced it.
It was real anger. White-hot rage. Rage that he had done this to her.
Why the hell had he started the car that night? Why couldn’t they just have stayed at the party and slept it off?
But she kept all that back as she stared at him. Prone to outbursts: which meant that sometimes she couldn’t be certain if her anger was justified or not. They told her she hadn’t been angry before the accident, that she’d been a happy, snarky, easygoing person.
She was pretty sure her anger was justified here though. The strength of it surprised her; the mass of it in her chest almost made it difficult to breathe. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this intensely.
Yet another thing her injury had torn from her. Yet another thing he owed her for.
He walked his fingers along his hat brim, tap tap tap.
He used to do that same thing, only he’d done it on her. He’d walked his fingers down her arm, across her belly, and up her thighs, mapping the terrain of her. Her breath went shallow.
“You can’t hang around here,” she said with quiet force. There wasn’t time to parse everything inside her—she had to get back to work.
“Right.” He nodded. “I only wanted to say that I’m sorry. About everything. And I’m working—from now on I’ll always be working—on being a better person.”
She felt it rise again, that rage, like lava pushing through the crust of her outward numbness. Panting in time with the swells of it, she tightened her stance in order to better ride it out. Thank God for therapy—it had taught her how to suppress her impulses.
He was sorry, was he? Not half as sorry as she was. And he could probably still see out of both eyes, could probably trust everything his brain told him. Probably didn’t even think twice about it.
She forced her muscles to unclench. She couldn’t vent the emotion in the stacks, no matter how real this rage felt. The library silence was sacrosanct. And she had to be professional here.
“You should be sorry,” she hissed. She grabbed the cart, shoving it between them. “I have to get back to work.”
But instead of slinking off, he smiled. A fond, reminiscing smile. “You’re exactly the same.” He sounded unaccountably pleased by that.
His words stopped her short. No one had ever said that to her after the accident. It was all about how great she looked—but never anything about the old Leonora or how much was left of her in this Leonora. Based on what she remembered and the stories she could get out of people, the old Leonora was better off gone.
Except Josh didn’t seem to think so.
“I’ll see you,” Josh said with a sad smile when she didn’t speak. “Or actually, I won’t.” He took a few steps back. “Your hair’s different though. I like it.”
The bubble of her rage popped, leaving a sticky residue around her heart. And taking its place came an urgent curiosity, quite unlike the pallid copy of it she’d experienced when she’d first seen him.
He’d known what her hair had been like before. He’d known her before. In a way that no one else had. She knew she wasn’t the same person she’d been before the accident, that there were huge holes in her memories of her life and herself from before.
Her family knew her as a daughter and a sister and had helped to fill in those gaps. Her friends had helped her to reconstruct who she’d been as a friend.
But Josh had been her lover. He’d known her as something completely unique. A part of herself that she might never be able to recover. Any relationship she had after this would be different, simply because she was different.
“Do you remember what happened?” The question burst from her like a dam breaking.
He halted, his gaze weary but patient.
“That night?” she clarified although it was probably unnecessary.
“Yeah.”
“All of it?”
“Yeah.” His voice was rough to the point of breaking.
“I don’t remember any of it.” Her voice was steady, shored up by a desperate want. That was the ultimate blank space in her mind—exactly what had occurred. He was the only one who knew the real story of what had happened. She’d assumed he didn’t remember either. But he did.
It was all there in his unmarred brain.
“Do you want me to tell you about it?” He seemed confused, as if she were asking for something she should never want.
“Yes,” she said without hesitation.
She deserved that knowledge. It belonged to her, along with every other memory he had of her. Yes, he’d been responsible for the loss, but he could aid in the recovery. It was the least he could do for her.
“I can’t really tell you here. You’ve got to work, remember?” He gave her a smile that rang a memory deep in her. He used to give her that smile a lot. “Also, if your brother or my brothers or anyone who knows our brothers sees us together…”
“That covers pretty much the entire town.” She could imagine what Jackson might threaten Josh with if he caught them together. Although that bit about his own brothers was unexpected.
“Yeah. Also, I can’t drive.”
“Me neither.”
That caught him up short. “You can’t?”
She sighed. She didn’t want to get into her neurological chart here. “No. So where can we meet?”
He tapped his hat against his thigh. “I have someone I can trust not to talk. Maybe he can help.”
“Who?”
“Javier.”
“Pilar’s little brother? He can drive?”
“Yeah. He’s already out of high school.”
Lord, but she felt old some days, and not just because of the time stolen by the aftermath of the crash. “Are you sure he won’t tell? Isn’t Pilar dating your brother?”
“Yeah, but he feels the same as I do about Benedict.”
That didn’t sound promising. Javier was young, disliked Benedict… What if he was as feckless as Josh had once been? Or she’d been?
It didn’t really matter though since they should only meet the once. He’d tell her all the details of the accident, and that would be it. All the other parts of her he had in his head—memories of how she’d been when they were together—she didn’t need those. Best to leave those alone, especially if everyone was right about how immature and destructive she’d been before. He could have them with her blessing.
“Fine,” she said, “if you trust him. Only one meeting though. I just want to know what happened that night.”
“Of course. You’ve my word on that.”
She almost snorted. His word had been worthless before.
But not his word to you. He’d given the middle finger to the entire world but not to her. She remembered that much. It had been the two of them together, against their families, against the world.
“The barbecue place, the one that’s closed now?” she asked him. He nodded in answer. “There’s a walled patio in the rear. And the lock on the gate is busted. We could meet there. No one would see us or even think to look there.”
That would solve the issue of their brothers ever catching them. She’d been good at that before, hiding the evidence of their wrongdoing. Josh had always called her the brains of their outlaw pair.
“Sounds good,” he said. There was a warmth in his eyes that she tried to ignore. “When do you want to meet?”
Leonora thought on that. “Next Friday. I can tell Jasmine I’m working late.”
“Jasmine picks you up?”
“Yeah. We share a place over in the complex on Armitage Street.”
He nodded. “That’s a nice place.” He took a step away. “I’ll let you get back to it. And I’ll see you Friday.” He stopped. “Actually, how do I get a library card?”
She blinked at him. He wanted a library card? “You never used to read.”
“I picked it up in… in prison.”
“Ah.” That made sense. She hadn’t really thought of him being in prison prison all these years. More like he’d just been… gone. “I can help you with it.”
“Thank you. Got any recommendations?”
“Well, it is National Hispanic Heritage Month.” She’d actually picked out most of the books on display—a mix of literary fiction, thrillers, and even some romance. It had tickled her that the romances were snatched up the very day the display went up.
He laughed. “And I have Hispanic heritage, so it’s perfect, right?”
“Right.” She gestured him toward the front desk. “We’ll get you set up with a card and some books.”
Perhaps it was her imagination, but it felt as if all the patrons were staring, their gazes heavy on them as she led him to the circulation desk. But that was silly—he was a patron too, and she was just doing her job. Nothing more.
After all, everyone knew whatever had been between them before had irreparably shattered the night of the accident.