“As far as I know, finances are no issue to your family.”
“So you told them I was at death’s door, and no one bothered to come.”
“I told them no such thing. You weren’t at death’s door.”
“It could have gone either way for a while.”
Silence. Heavy. Oppressive. Then he simply said, “Yes.”
“So I’m on the worst terms with them.”
It seemed he’d let this go uncommented on, too. Then he gave a noncommittal shrug. “I don’t know about the worst terms. But it’s my understanding you’re not close.”
“Not even with my mother?”
“Especially with your mother.”
“Great. See? I was right when I thought I was better off not remembering. Not knowing.”
“It isn’t as bad as you’re painting it. By the time I called your family, you were stable, and there really was nothing for any of them to do but wait like the rest of us. Your mother did call twice for updates, and I told her you were doing very well. Physically. Psychologically, I suggested it might not be a good thing in this early phase for you to be jogged by their presence or contact, any more than you already are.”
He was making excuses for her family, her mother. If they’d cared, they wouldn’t have been satisfied with long-distance assurances. Or maybe he had discouraged them from coming, so he wouldn’t introduce an unpredictable emotional element into her neurological recovery?
The truth was, she didn’t care right now how things really stood with her family. What she was barely able to breathe from needing to know was her status with her husband.
“And that’s my not-so-bad situation with my family. But from my husband’s pointed absence, I can only assume the worst. That maybe we’re separated or getting divorced.”
She wanted him to say, Yes, you are.
Please, say it.
His jaw muscles bunched, his gaze chilled. When he finally spoke it felt like an arctic wind blasting her, freezing her insides with this antipathy that kept spiking out of nowhere.
“Far from being separated, you and your husband have been planning a second honeymoon.”
Cybele doubted the plane crashing into the ground had a harder impact than Rodrigo’s revelation.
Her mind emptied. Her heart spilled all of its beats at once.
For a long, horrified moment she stared at him, speech skills and thought processes gone, only blind instincts left. They all screamed run, hide, deny.
She’d been so certain…so…certain…
“A second honeymoon?” She heard her voice croaking. “Does that mean we…we’ve been married long?”
He waited an eternity before answering. At least it felt that way. By the time he did, she felt she’d aged ten years. “You were married six months ago.”
“Six months? And already planning a second honeymoon?”
“Maybe I should have said honeymoon, period. Circumstances stopped you from having one when you first got married.”
“And yet my adoring husband isn’t here. Our plans probably were an attempt to salvage a marriage that was malfunctioning beyond repair, and we shouldn’t have bothered going through the motions…”
She stopped, drenched in mortification. She instinctively knew she wasn’t one to spew vindictiveness like that. Her words had been acidic enough to eat through the gleaming marble floor.
Their corrosiveness had evidently splashed Rodrigo. From the way his face slammed shut, he clearly disapproved of her sentiments and the way she’d expressed them. Of her.
“I don’t know much about your relationship. But his reason for not being at your bedside is uncontestable. He’s dead.”
She lurched as if he’d backhanded her.
“He was flying the plane,” she choked. “You remember?”
“No. Oh, God.” A geyser of nausea shot from her depths. She pitched to the side of the bed. Somehow she found Rodrigo around her, holding her head and a pan. She retched emptily, shook like a bell that had been struck by a giant mallet.
And it wasn’t from a blow of grief. It was from one of horror, at the anger and relief that were her instinctive reactions.
What kind of monster was she to feel like that about somebody’s death, let alone that of her husband? Even if she’d fiercely wanted out of the relationship. Was it because of what she felt for Rodrigo? She’d wished her husband dead to be with him? No. No. She just knew it hadn’t been like that. It had to have been something else. Could her husband have been abusing her? Was she the kind of woman who would have suffered humiliation and damage, too terrified to block the blows or run away?
She consulted her nature, what transcended memory, what couldn’t be lost or forgotten, what was inborn and unchangeable.
It said, no way. If that man had abused her, emotionally or physically, she would have carved his brains out with forceps and sued him into his next few reincarnations.
So what did this mess mean?
“Are you okay?”
She shuddered miserably. “If feeling mad when I should be sad is okay. There must be more wrong with me than I realized.”
After the surprise her words induced, contemplation settled on his face. “Anger is a normal reaction in your situation.”
“What?” He knew why it was okay to feel so mad at a dead man?
“It’s a common reaction for bereaved people to feel anger at their loved ones who die and leave them behind. It’s worse when someone dies in an accident that that someone had a hand in or caused. The first reaction after shock and disbelief is rage, and it’s all initially directed toward the victim. That also explains your earlier attack of bitterness. Your subconscious must have known that he was the one flying the plane. It might have recorded all the reports that flew around you at the crash site.”
“You’re saying I speak Spanish?”
He frowned. “Not to my knowledge. But maybe you approximated enough medical terminology to realize the extent of his injuries…”
“Ya lo sé hablar español.”
She didn’t know which of them was more flabbergasted.
The Spanish words had flowed from a corner in her mind to her tongue without conscious volition. And she certainly knew what they meant. I know how to speak Spanish.
“I…had no idea you spoke Spanish.”
“Neither did I, obviously. But I get the feeling that the knowledge is partial…fresh.”
“Fresh? How so?”
“It’s just a feeling, since I remember no facts. It’s like I’ve only started learning it recently.”
He fixed her with a gaze that seeped into her skin, mingled into the rapids of her blood. Her temperature inched higher.
Was he thinking what she was thinking? That she’d started learning Spanish because of him? To understand his mother tongue, understand him better, to get closer to him?
At last he said, “Whatever the case may be, you evidently know enough Spanish to validate my theory.”
He was assigning her reactions a perfectly human and natural source. Wonder what he’d say if she set him straight?
She bet he’d think her a monster. And she wouldn’t blame him. She was beginning to think it herself.
Next second she was no longer thinking it. She knew it.
The memory that perforated her brain like a bullet was a visual. An image that corkscrewed into her marrow. The image of Mel, the husband she remembered with nothing but anger, whose death aroused only a mixture of resentment and liberation.
In a wheelchair.
Other facts dominoed like collapsing pillars, crushing everything beneath their impact. Not memories, just knowledge.
Mel had been paralyzed from the waist down. In a car accident. During their relationship. She didn’t know if it had been before or after they’d gotten married. She didn’t think it mattered.