Ellie

A nagging sense of emptiness filled me wherever I went and whatever I did, and this, coupled with Roman's sudden disappearance had me feeling both bored and jumpy. I might not have known who I was before the vast majority of my memories were scrubbed away in the accident, but I was pretty sure I knew what I wasn't lazy. I knew instinctively that I wasn't the kind of gal who could be happy to just sit around browsing the Internet all day. I paced around the apartment, looking for something to do. I opened a cupboard, more out of absent-minded boredom than for any other, real reason. The dark closet contained enough cleaning supplies to manage an office building, let alone a small apartment, and like everything else in Roman's domain, it was neatly organized with military precision.

My mouth curled into a slight grin as I briefly considered cleaning the place, just for something to do, but I dismissed the thought as soon as it had arrived. "Yeah right," I said to no one in particular. "I'm not going to pretend to be some kind of perfect wife for this guy." No matter how hot, or mysterious he is… The last bit I kept entirely for the privacy of my own head. I wasn't even sure I wanted to admit to myself how much I fancied the reserved Russian, as much because of what falling for a man who was, in essence, my kidnapper said about me as for anything else.

As I restlessly paced through the apartment, I began to notice a divide that hadn't been apparent at first glance. Where the construction and decoration was complete, the rooms were immaculately clean, tidy and organized; but where Roman hadn't yet managed to finish painting, or putting up drywall, the exact opposite held true. Trays of dried paint, full pots and planks of wood were haphazardly piled up, begging for an accident. I felt as though it represented two halves of a single, fractured globe. Still pacing, but locked up in my own head, I accidentally stubbed my bare toe against a heavy pot of light gray emulsion paint. I hopped around the room on one foot, holding the other tightly to ward off the pain and hurling obscenities into the air. But even as I catapulted myself around the room, just trying to keep moving, to keep my mind off the pain, I began to have the beginnings of an idea.

What if I smartened this place up? I thought. I couldn't help but imagine the surprised, yet gratified smile that would form on Roman's face when he walked through the door, back from wherever he had disappeared off to. The thought warmed me up inside, and besides, I thought, rationalizing away the cheesy, fuzzy warmth that had begun to brew in my stomach, it would give me something to do.

I looked for a paintbrush, but that was the one thing that wasn't stacked untidily in a pile, waiting for its chance to deal someone's careless toes a heavy helping of pain. I went looking for a paintbrush, but instead I found the truth. A part of it, anyway. I breezed through the kitchen, idly pulling out drawers. Almost every one of them were empty, a far cry from my own home, which was filled to the rafters with useless, must-have knickknacks. Almost every drawer, that is, except for the one that wasn't. That one filled with old-school, black cell phones, from a world back before apps and smart phones. My reporter's brain supplied the word. Burners.

My fingers jumped back off the drawer like I'd been scalded, and my brain was filled with an overwhelming sense of betrayal. Air hissed out of my lungs, and the word "No," escaped my lips. The second I saw my medical records, stuffed in a drawer and hidden away, I knew that I'd been betrayed. I might not have understood the full extent of what was going on, or why I was being hidden away like Rapunzel in her tower, but I understood one thing very clearly: I was being lied to. Roman was lying to me, and had been for some time.

Maybe he's just a sicko…

I leafed through the brown manila folder, suddenly desperate to discover the truth. When I found it, what I read bowled me over. My heart rate quickened, then doubled in speed, accelerating every second as my eyes greedily devoured the text. The words were troubling, no, devastating. All at once I fully understood the aching sense of emptiness, loneliness and abandonment that I'd been carrying around since I awoke from my coma, one question answered, but another dozen doors opened. "No," I cried in anguish. "That can't be right, it just can't…"

Now, there was only one thought on my mind. One place I needed to be.

And it wasn't here.

* * *

"Alice," I hissed. I was skulking in the shadows, near the staff entrance to Alexandria General, a place that I'd watched out of my hospital window many times, but never visited. The friendly middle-age nurse turned with a smile, aware that she'd heard a familiar voice, but so far unable to precisely place the source. After spending four hours lurking outside the hospital, making sure that nobody spotted that I was there, I was cold, wet and tired, with an unfamiliar ache in legs that, for all my vain attempts to exercise them, were still unaccustomed to hard work. But I didn't feel any of it. A burning sense of duty carried me forward, as powerful as any soldier's in the line of duty, because my duty was the most powerful goal for any woman in any time. If I had ever allowed myself to be weak before, to bob like a rudderless dinghy on the surface of waves that I didn't understand and couldn't control, then that time was gone.

Alice turned, and recoiled with surprise as she saw me, all color draining from her face. I had spent many long hours talking to her over the course of my recovery, and knew that above all, she was a strong, passionate, proud person, for whom her chosen profession was a calling, rather than a career. Yet, in a city like Alexandria, only a fool would be happy to see a mob target turning up out of the blue for a chat. Her hand trembled as she lifted it up to wave at me, before seeming to recognize the nervous message it conveyed. "Ellie…" She stammered, struggling for words. "What are you doing here? Are you…" She paused. "Are you okay?"

As she drew closer to me, I could see that the skin around her eyes was drawn, and wrinkled with tiredness. Perhaps the color hadn't drained from her face, so much as it had never been there in the first place. I saw all that, and yet I still couldn't contain myself. "How could you not tell me, Alice? How could you?" I broke off, my voice disappearing under the immense strain of the anguish.

She pulled me nervously into a concrete alcove beside the hospital entrance, and, my subconscious mind noticed, underneath but out of sight of a CCTV camera. "Ellie," she said, layering a professional the near over a voice that was still ruled with stress and sorrow. "What are you doing here? Where have you been? The police –"

I cut her off. "Answer me, Alice," I burst out. "Do you think I'm here for a social call?" There was a hard edge to my voice that I didn't recognize. But if I had to be a different person, had to take up a roll to survive, and to protect my own, then I knew without a doubt that I was up for the task.

She recoiled as though she'd been stung, and for a second I thought that I'd gone too far. But no sooner was I about to broach the uncomfortable, tense silence than her shoulders slumped forward, and she seemed to age a dozen years in a moment. "We were going to, Ellie," she began. "Believe me, 100 times, believe me. You don't know how hard it was for me –"

"How hard it was for you?" I exclaimed, feeling the cold flame of anger beginning to lick around my stomach.

She raised her hand to stop me before I got into my stride. I had enough of me left to hold back. I hadn't come here for a fight, I'd come here for a path out of this mess, and attacking Alice wasn't going to get me the answers that I wanted. "I know, I know," she said, with the pallet color of the defeated woman. "I'm sorry, please, please believe me. Will you listen?" She asked.

I nodded.

"With a case like yours…" She started, bouncing nervously from foot to foot. "A traumatic brain injury of that magnitude, that extent," she paused, weighing up the words. "It's almost unprecedented. And of course, that's not even mentioning your condition."

"My condition?" I questioned dangerously. "I was pregnant. I was pregnant, and nobody said a damn thing. Not even you, Alice. A month, was it, that I was awake, and even you didn't tell me."

Alice eyed me up, with the same nervous look that a beaten dog might give its master. "Six weeks. You know that… You know the child survived?"

The child. Hearing her say it brought it home to me, that I was a mother, and that I didn't know whether I'd given birth to a son or daughter, didn't even know their name. I might never have known that I was pregnant, even, couldn't trust my feeble, damaged brain to give me that tiny comfort.

I nodded. "That's why I'm here, Alice. Like I said, not a social call, huh. Where is –." I fell silent, my brain struggling to grasp the fact that I didn't know whether to call my child a he, or she. I thought of saying it, but that felt cold, and impersonal. What kind of mother would talk about that child like that?

"Can I tell you something," Alice said softly, her chin falling almost to her chest. She seemed small now, not the same confident, capable woman who'd held my hand through an awakening and recovery that had been so terrifying and fragile that it almost mirrored a baby's entrance into this cold, cruel world. She didn't wait for a reply, just started talking in a sad, defeated monotone. "Almost a year," she said quietly. "Almost a year you were in that coma, a tiny bit more actually. I remember the day they wheeled you into the TBI ward, and a year later, I sat by your bedside for your anniversary." She laughed sadly." You've got to understand, Ellie, no one wakes up after an injury like yours, it just doesn't happen. You almost three months pregnant when they brought you in, and you wouldn't believe how many arguments we had about what to do about it, about you."

My hand jumped reflexively to my belly, though it's inhabitant was long gone. I felt sick with worry, and pained by the thought that my child's life had once been up in the air, at the mercy of a bunch of uninvolved, emotionless doctors. "What are you talking about?" I croaked.

"I rubbed cocoa butter on your stomach every day, you know that?" Alice whispered, talking in riddles. "

"How could I not have known?" I wailed, tackling the knotted, tough meat of the issue for the first time. Fickle waves of temperature coursed through my body, like a fever breaking and then roaring back ever stronger – only dozens of times a second as my brain struggled to process what Alice was saying. "What kind of mother,” my voice cracked. “What kind of mother forgets her own damn kid? What kind of person does that make me?”

“It’s not your fault. None of it is. The brain protects itself," Alice said, more confidently now that she was back on the familiar ground of her medical expertise. "From things it's not yet ready to confront. That would be my guess, anyhow. But you, Ellie? I gave up trying to guess with you a long time ago... You're an enigma, a cipher, a miracle. The things that have happened to you, they just shouldn't happen." She looked up, flushed as she realized what she was implying. "But I'm glad they did."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a pair of heavyset, grim-faced man in cheap blue overcoats exiting the staff parking garage. My heart began to beat faster, hitting irregular, terrified notes in a symphony of fear. I turned to look at them more carefully. They aren't doctors, I thought. "Alice," I shouted. "Run!"