She wished they wouldn’t refer to it like that. They meant it as a joke, of course, but she didn’t find it all that funny.
In the big, bad world, she had to create a new life for herself. An independent life…well, as independent as a life could be that also contained the ten-year-old who was her son, Richard. Ricky.
She thought of him and the corners of her lips tipped up as she stepped under the shower spray. He might scare her to death—he did scare her to death—but he could still make her smile. Her fingers closed around the bar of oatmeal soap, and she brought it against her body.
And froze.
“Damn, damn, damn,” she muttered, slamming the bar back into place. Then she reached toward her knees and grasped the wet hem of her sopping nightshirt to pull it over her head. It landed in the bottom of the shower stall with a splat.
The small mistake put her in lousy mood that the bright dining hall and the excellent breakfast menu couldn’t dissipate. One of the rehab counselors noted it, apparently, because she came to sit beside Linda during her second cup of coffee.
“Bad dreams? Headache?” she asked.
Those were a couple of lingering ailments, but not today’s problem. Linda felt heat warm her cheeks. “Showered in my nightgown.”
The counselor smiled. “Is that all?”
“Isn’t that enough? What kind of grown woman steps under the spray of the shower wearing her clothes? It’s bad enough that I have to have routines to remind myself to wash and rinse my hair. Now I’m forgetting to get naked first.”
The woman leaned closer. “Don’t tell anyone, but once I came to work in my pink fuzzy slippers. When we have a lot on our minds, sometimes we let the simple things slip by.”
But how was she supposed to be independent, let alone a mother, if she couldn’t remember the simple things?
The other woman must have read the question on her face. “You handled the situation, didn’t you, Linda? You recognized the error, coped with it. That’s all any of us can ask of ourselves.”
Linda had never been a whiner, but still… “It was a shower,” she muttered. “You’d think I could get that right.”
“Is there something else bothering you, Linda? Some worry? You know that can put you off your game.”
Linda drummed her fingertips against the tabletop. A few months back, she hadn’t had the dexterity to do such a thing. The hours of drilling with computer games had paid off. “It’s…it’s a man,” she admitted.
“Ryan Fortune?” The counselor rubbed Linda’s shoulder. “Grief is perfectly normal, too.”
Linda gave a vague nod. She did grieve for Ryan. He’d been a gentle friend to her, like a kindly uncle, and he’d given her a much-needed anchor in those first months after she came fully, miraculously conscious. It had been Ryan who had found this wonderful facility, and had paid for it. It had been Ryan who, she learned a few days after his death, had set up trusts for both herself and her son that gave them financial security for the rest of their lives.
“But it’s a different man I’m thinking of,” she told the counselor. Her hand automatically reached for her notebook and flipped it open to the most recent page. It was what she’d written after the breakfast reminder.
9:00 a.m., you have a meeting with the Armstrongs…
The Armstrongs were another miracle in her life. After Ricky’s birth, Ryan had met the couple through the Mothers Against Drunk Driving organization. They’d lost their daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter to a drunk driver. Learning of what had befallen Linda, they’d opened their home to Ricky and their hearts to his mother, as well, even though for long years she hadn’t been aware of their weekly visits or their prayers and hopes for her recovery. They were going to bring her to their house when she was released from rehab and assured her that she and Ricky had a place with them for as long as she liked. She knew they regarded her as a daughter and Ricky as their treasured grandson.
The Armstrongs didn’t worry her.
9:00 a.m., you have a meeting with the Armstrongs and Emmett Jamison.
Emmett Jamison. Now he worried her. Her finger nervously tapped the page beneath his name.
“Who’s Emmett Jamison?” the counselor asked.
“What is more like it,” Linda said under her breath. FBI agent. Tough guy. So take-charge he had made her feel flustered, hot and confused with just one level look from those searing green eyes of his. A woman who’d been half-asleep for so many years didn’t have one technique on hand to cope with him.
The day they’d met, he’d been adamant about who he was. “I’m the man who’s going to be looking after you,” he’d said, then stalked off, leaving her staring. She would have dismissed him as a loony or some figment of her misfiring memory if Ricky hadn’t discovered the intriguing FBI agent, tough-guy tidbits from some others attending Ryan’s memorial. And then yesterday, Emmett had phoned to tell her he’d arranged to speak with her and the Armstrongs. She had no idea why. She was afraid to guess.
“Linda, who is this man?” the counselor prodded.
“Emmett Jamison is…” Her hand lifted. “Emmett Jamison is…”
“Early,” filled in a deep voice from the doorway of the dining room.
Linda shivered, because there he was, staring at her with those intense green eyes of his and looking dark and determined. A big, bad wolf from the big, bad world.
Two
Linda discovered that the hallways of the rehab facility weren’t wide enough when Emmett Jamison was walking by her side. He seemed so big, so male, in his casual slacks and open-throated dress shirt. It wasn’t as if he tried to crowd her, but he just seemed to be so close, so there, as she led the way toward her room.
He was loud, too. Not in the usual sense—as a matter of fact, he didn’t even make an attempt at small talk—but the quiet way he moved, the confident aura attached to him made his very presence noisy. There was no way to ignore someone like that.
She couldn’t wait to get rid of him.
“You didn’t say why you wanted to meet with me,” she ventured. If she hadn’t been so surprised and confused when he’d called the day before, she would have insisted on finding out the reason then.
“I didn’t?” His expression remained unreadable as he glanced into one of the rehab classrooms. Three of the center’s clients sat at different tables, one working on a computer game, another inserting pegs in a pegboard, another putting together a simple puzzle. “Is that the kind of thing you’ve been doing the past year?” he asked.
“Yes,” Linda answered. There was no point in pretending otherwise. “Computer games and puzzles to improve dexterity and memory and focus. And then there have been sessions of physical therapy, speech therapy and occupational therapy. In many respects—most, maybe—I was like a child when I came here. There was a lot I had to relearn.”
“But now you’re… What would you call it? Up to speed? Cured?”
Anxiety washed over Linda again like a cold sweat. “I’ll never be cured,” she admitted. It was the hard truth that the rehab center tried to make the head-injured understand. “I’m a different person now than I was before the car accident.”
But exactly who was that new person? The question was only exacerbated by the decade that she’d lost. With her past nearly as hazy as her future, she continued to struggle with developing her identity—even believing that she could. Leaving the rehab center, she worried, would only make that