I erupt into sobs so hysterical, Theo freezes in shock. Clinging to him with every ounce of strength in my arms, I bury my face in his neck and pour out my euphoria in wave after uncontrollable wave of tears.

“I knew it!” I wail, my voice muffled against his skin. “I knew you’d come back to me!”

Theo’s frozen muscles relax. He exhales, pressing a kiss to my neck. With an edge like a purr, a low laugh rumbles through his chest.

“Sweetheart,” he whispers, his lips near my ear. “I was only gone for a few weeks.” His tone turns gently teasing. “Are you always gonna get this emotional after sex?”

The words are Theo’s, but the voice is one I know well, its timbre a shade more husky, but otherwise unchanged. The echo of that voice has lived in my mind for five long years. I’d recognize it anywhere.

“No—you know what I mean!” I lift my head and stare into his eyes. “Cass, Cass, I love you! I never stopped, not even for a second! I always knew you’d come back!”

Theo stops breathing. He falls still, as still as a corpse. Into his eyes comes a look of pure horror. “What?”

I’m crying so hard, I almost can’t see. Insane with joy, I press frantic kisses all over his neck. “Why did you try to stay away from me? Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Why didn’t you come find me in Phoenix?”

He abruptly pushes away from me, withdrawing his body and warmth in a whip-crack move so fast, it’s blinding. He leaps up and stands nude at the foot of the bed, gazing down at me with wide, wild eyes, his hands trembling.

He whispers, “What the hell are you talking about?”

Time stops.

All the clocks in the world stop ticking.

Gravity releases its hold on me and blasts me off into black, frozen space.

I sit up in bed and draw the covers over my naked breasts, and we stare at each other across the silence of the room until I find the courage to speak. “You don’t have to pretend. I won’t…I won’t tell anyone.” My laugh is small, choked with fear. “Who would believe us anyway?”

After a pause in which I hear every beat of my banging heart, Theo says through gritted teeth, “Who would believe us about what?”

My blood crystallizes to ice.

No.

No, this can’t be happening.

Tears are still sliding down my cheeks, but I can no longer feel them. I no longer know how to blink, or move, or even breathe.

“Cass—”

“I’m not your dead fucking husband!” Theo roars in my dead husband’s voice.

The acid bite of bile forces its way up my throat. I swallow it down, shivering uncontrollably. The air has gone so cold, we could be in a crypt. I say hoarsely, “Why are you lying?”

All the light leaves Theo’s eyes. They go dead. It’s like watching storm shades being slammed over windows. “This is why you want me? Because you think I’m him?”

Listening to those words in that voice causes a fissure in my brain. I feel it—a quick, hard snap—like ice cracking underfoot.

I jolt to my feet, right there on the mattress. Clutching the sheet to my chest, I draw a breath so ragged, it sounds like a death rattle. My voice is even worse, as hollow and eerie as if I’m speaking from beyond the grave.

“I don’t think you’re him—you are him. And you’re you. You’re both, and you’re perfect.”

“Stop it,” he says flatly.

“No. Why did you stop talking after your accident, Theo? Why haven’t you spoken a word to anyone in five years?”

He answers without hesitation. “My vocal cords were damaged from smoke inhalation in the accident. My voice changed, and I hated how strange it sounded.”

A hysterical laugh tears from my throat. “Smoke damage? Is that how they explained it to you at Acadia? Because I think we both know it’s something else.”

“Megan, stop—”

“Did you ever see me before I moved here, Theo?”

All the blood drains from his face. He’s as white as the sheet I’m clutching in my fist. He whispers, “I…I had a brain injury, Megan. My hallucinations…they’re not real.”

“Then why did you ask Coop how you could remember someone you’d never met?”

Theo swallows, briefly closing his eyes. In a rasp, he says, “My doctor said I couldn’t get well unless I started talking again, unless I forced myself to. I didn’t want to do it for the first time in front of everyone last night at the party—”

“How did you know me, Theo?”

With a strangled cry, Theo runs over to his clothes, left in a pile on the floor on his side of the bed. He yanks on his jeans, shirt, and jacket while I sink farther and farther into the black delirium rising like floodwaters inside my mind.

They drugged him. Those sons of bitches at Acadia, that soulless bastard Dr. Garner—they fed him drugs, told him he’s schizophrenic, and brainwashed him into believing a miracle was mental illness.

I’m not having it. I’m not having any of it. This is my soul mate, and I won’t let anyone take him away from me.

Not again.

I shout, “You’re afraid of yellow balloons!”

Theo flinches as if I’ve punched him in the gut. Backing away slowly toward the bedroom door, he stares at me as I give witness to the truth of who he is at the absolute top of my lungs.

“Your mother’s name was Mary! Your father was Dan! When you were ten years old, you got a beagle and named him Snoopy!”

Theo slaps his hands over his ears. Shaking his head and still moving backward, his face crumples, and he starts to cry.

“You loved hot dogs and bear claws and Mad Max movies! You photographed lightning strikes and painted landscapes in oils! You proposed to me in the same place we first made love when we were sixteen, under the blooming acacia at our favorite spot in the bend in the Salt River! You had a tattoo of Matthew verse seven across your back, because you were a seeker who believed that the only way to get at the truth was to knock on every door until you found it!”

His sob tears a hole in my heart, but I have to keep going. I can’t stop, no matter how much he might want me to. I have to break through this wall of denial once and for all.

I step down from the mattress and stalk toward him, one step forward for each stumbling step he takes away, my body racked with tremors, my voice rising to a scream.

“And whether you choose to accept it or not, the truth is that you died at 12:02 in the morning on the seventeenth of May five years ago—your name was Cassidy Michael Dunn, and you were the love of my life!”

Crying openly now, Theo turns and sprints from the room.

As his footsteps pound hollowly down the stairs, I lose the strength in my legs. I sink to my knees, the room spinning. In a few moments, the front door slams with a boom that rattles the windows. The roar of a car engine breaks the still of the morning outside, followed by the angry squeal of tires spinning against pavement, then another roar as the car takes off at top speed down the street. I don’t have to look to know the car is mine. Theo obviously took my keys from my purse.

I kneel in the same spot for a long time, blank and drained. My mind doesn’t sharpen until I hear the wail of sirens far in the distance.

Then the blankness is replaced by a terror so powerful, I’m still frozen in place when the phone begins to ring.

* * *

I run.

I run so hard and with such focus, I don’t see Coop’s red truck blast past me down the boulevard leading into town. I can’t see anything, I can’t hear anything except the solemn voice of the young man calling from the hospital. The words play on a dark, terrible repeat inside my head.

“We found your number in his clothing. There’s been an accident.”

Accident.

Three simple syllables with the power to ruin lives.

I pump my arms and legs as hard as they can go, my chest heaving, hot tears streaming down my cheeks. I’m barefoot, but I don’t feel the cold asphalt of the road under my feet. I don’t feel the misty morning air on my face, or hear my harsh, labored gasps, or smell the sea breeze. I’m half-dead already.

If Theo’s gone by the time I get to the hospital, the rest of me will follow.

“Megan!”

My name sounds as if it’s been shouted at me from underwater. It’s muffled, distorted, a long way away. I keep running.

“Megan!”

A red truck pulls next to me in the street. The window is down. Coop is shouting my name. I remember I called him to come get me because I didn’t have a car, and sob in relief.

I slow just enough to yank open the door and throw myself inside. Without waiting for the door to close, Coop slams his foot against the gas pedal, and we rocket down the street.

“How bad is it?”

My teeth chatter so hard, I can barely manage to answer Coop’s question. “I don’t know. They didn’t say. They just said come quick.”

“Fuck.”

No more words are spoken. In a few short minutes, we screech to a stop outside the emergency room doors of the only hospital in Seaside. I’m out of the truck before Coop has time to shut off the engine.

I burst through the doors and look wildly around, panting in panic. I throw myself at the admission desk, startling the plump brunette sitting behind it when I start shouting.

“Theo Valentine! I’m here for Theo Valentine! Where is he? Where is he? I have to see him!”

“Ma’am, please, calm down!” She rises, hands held up, eyes wide.

I know I look like a madwoman, but I don’t care. Furious, I pound my fists on the desk and scream, “Take me to him now!”

Coop grabs my shoulders and peels me off the desk.

“Mornin’, Angela,” he says to the brunette, firmly wedging me under his arm. “Sorry ’bout that. We’re all upset—got a call they brought Theo in.”

I lean against Coop and weep into his flannel shirt, so scared, I’m delirious.

“Yes, not long ago,” says the brunette, sounding rattled. “I’ll see if I can get someone to come out and talk to you. Why don’t you have a seat in the waiting room?”

“Thanks.”

Coop drags me away from the desk and down a short hallway, catching me every time I stumble, his arm the only thing holding me up. When we round the corner and enter a sterile, brightly lit room filled with rows of chairs and one sickly plant dying in a corner, I pull up short, shocked to see Colleen sitting there in her Catwoman costume, crying.

She looks up, catches sight of me and Coop standing in the doorway, and cries harder.

She wails, “I can’t go through this again, Coop!”

I don’t know what’s happening. My mind is broken. Nothing makes sense.

Coop gently sets me in a chair opposite her, makes sure I’m steady, then kneels in front of her and takes her hands. “What happened, Colleen?”

Through her sobs, she tells the story. “W-we were at the Halloween party at Booger’s. Craig and I… We got into a fight. He was flirting with every girl there, just being obnoxious about it. And I know it was bad timing, but I was so mad, I told him about the baby—”

“Baby?” Coop says, startled.

Colleen nods, her shoulders shaking. “We haven’t been dating very long. He wasn’t h-happy”—she hiccups, wiping the back of her hand across her face—“and said it probably wasn’t even his.”

His voice hard, Coop says, “Do I know this idiot?”

“Craig Kennedy. From Capstone Construction,” she whispers.

Coop curses under his breath. “Okay. Go on.”

“We left the party late and went back to my house. We kept fighting. H-he was drinking. He was drinking a lot.”

Fighting nausea, I close my eyes. Not again. Please God, not again.

“When he was leaving, I tried to stop him. I grabbed his keys, but he pushed me down and left. I was terrified he was going to hurt someone, so I followed him in my car and I…I called 9-1-1.”

“That’s good,” murmurs Coop. “You did the right thing.”

Colleen looks up at him. Mascara tracks long black streaks down her cheeks. Her face is red and wet, and her eyes are haunted. “It didn’t matter, though,” she whispers hoarsely. “He ran through that red light anyway. He hit that little car with his big sedan without even tapping his brakes. I saw the whole thing. Thought I’d die from shock. I ran up the curb on Broadway before I could get control of my car.”

Her face crumples, she squeezes her eyes shut, and she winds her arms protectively around herself and starts rocking. “When I went over to the sedan, Craig was bleeding on his face, but his airbag had deployed. I think he was just disoriented, not badly hurt. Then I went to the other car…and…I saw Theo inside. Craig T-boned his car in the middle of an intersection, just like what happened to Theo last time.”

She folds over into herself, dissolving into loud, body-racking sobs. “Why would God do this to me again, Coop? How could he make me go through this again?”

Because God is a monster, I want to tell her. A monster who hates us both.

Before Coop can give her the hug he’s about to give her, I stumble over to Colleen and grab her, throwing my arms around her and squeezing her hard. She clings to me, sobbing.

I’m not sure who I feel worse for. Which of us has God fucked over the most?

I whisper, “You don’t have to go through it alone this time, Colleen. We’ll go through it together.”

“I know you and Theo are dating,” she sobs. “I saw you together at the party, then Suzanne told me you’d been seeing him, and I’m so sorry…I’m just so fucking sorry—”

She breaks off into choked gasps and can’t go on.

“Okay, take it easy now, girls,” murmurs Coop. “We don’t know anything yet. Theo could be just fine.”

“Excuse me.”

A man’s voice from the doorway makes us all jump. It’s a doctor, tall, silver-haired, grim-faced. He looks over the three of us with a weary eye. “Which of you are with Mr. Kennedy?”

Colleen stands shakily. “That’s me.”

“Will you take a step outside, ma’am? The police are here. They’d like to talk to you.”

Colleen goes pale. “How is he?”

Sighing, the doctor smooths a hand over his hair. “Physically, he’s fine. He suffered only a few minor cuts on his face. But if he has an attorney, you should call him.”

“He’s being charged with drunk driving?” says Coop.

The doctor looks at Coop for a moment, his gaze steady. “For the time being.”

I know exactly what he means. I hear a low, agonized moan, but don’t realize until Coop hugs my shoulders that the person making it is me.

“What about Theo Valentine? What’s his condition?” Coop’s voice is as harsh as fingernails scraping down a chalkboard. When the doctor hesitates, Coop snaps, “Just fuckin’ tell us, man, we’re family!”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t look good.”

Colleen bursts into a fresh round of sobs, Coop curses, and I make that sound again, the one like an animal dying.

The doctor says, “His internal injuries are too severe for him to be moved safely at the moment, but as soon as he’s stabilized, we’ll have to fly him to our sister hospital in Portland.”

“Why?” barks Coop, the only other person in the room capable of speech.

“They have a neurosurgical unit there. We have to relieve the pressure of the subdural hematoma—”

“I don’t speak doctor!” Coop roars.

After a beat, the doctor says quietly, “His brain is bleeding. His spleen is ruptured. He has half a dozen broken bones, including a shattered rib that punctured and collapsed a lung. Blood is filling his pleural cavity, which could collapse the other lung. Most importantly, his brain wave activity is minimal. His situation is very grave. I’m sorry to have to ask you this, but does he have a DNR?”

Though Coop has reined in his temper, he’s staring at the doctor with a dangerous look in his eyes. “What’s a DNR?”

At the same time, Colleen and I whisper, “Do not resuscitate.”