"The good news, Aaron, and this is very good news, and very surprising news, is that you are alive, and you are going to make what I would call a full recovery. You have some intense scars but you are on track to get back your full health & strength. Most important, there does not appear to be any cognitive impairment, although there is a deeper round of testing ahead."
This was Dr. Murphy, the middle-aged woman who looked Japanese and sounded British.
"The bad news: you were the only survivor."
The tubes were gone. He could talk. He could also shake his head.
"You don't remember, but you were in a car accident. Your parents were driving, and your sister was in the car with you. Your father lost control of the vehicle, we believe, and spun out, and was hit by several other vehicles. Everyone was going too fast in bad weather. The damage to the car was beyond description, and the fact that you are alive is a genuine miracle. Everyone else died instantly."
She delivered the news in her manner, which was absolutely neutral. She wasn't offering sympathy, she was transmitting information.
He didn't feel any emotions about it one way or the other, but he found he appreciated her manner.
He also found he could read her intent quite clearly. She wanted him to have the freedom to process this information without anyone else's emotions present. She had learned this from many, many similar bedside conversations.
Why could he read her so clearly? He probed this. He saw it in her face, in her expression, in the sound of her voice, her body language - it was all as clear as day. It communicated everything he needed to know. There was more there.
She was single, her husband had left her for a younger woman, also Asian. But Chinese.
How could he know that from her facial expression? This was not possible.
"Thank you for telling me," he said.
"Do you remember the night?"
"Not in the slightest. I didn't remember I had a family until a few minutes ago."
"Some amnesia is to be expected. Some may be a blessing. More will return. I can read you your file if you like... Aaron Boles, Junior at Seton Hall, Major in Biochemistry - Good lad! - on the cycling team... does this ring a bell?"
It did. As she narrated it, images came to him, flashes and glimpses, snapshots of college life. But not his family.
She went on: "The process of regaining memories will continue. But, to be clear, you are out for the semester. You are going to need an intense rehab program if you want to ride a bike again. If you want to walk normally, in fact. As for what happens after that, there is a lawyer who left a card for you, executor of the will, you'll have some choices."
She was happy to tell him that, Aaron saw. It wasn't always the case.
He didn't say anything, and neither did she. He felt into it, saw into her. There was more there, if he wanted it. Lots more. He decided to experiment.
He found words: "Thank you, Dr. Murphy."
But he spoke them with his eyes, matching the... flow? Of the sound of his voice to a certain pattern he felt in her. He let the pattern align. He watched to see if he was imagining it.
She touched her necklace, and shifted her position. This was right. He was not imagining.
"I appreciate the professionalism of your visit," he added, keeping the voice aligned to that subtle thread of something interesting he felt in her, and saw that there was a perfect dissonance between his words and the effect he was reinforcing. For a moment, it seemed a very clever approach, but-
She looked at him sharply, and stood.
He had overplayed his hand; she was too savvy for that. That was a ploy for schoolgirls.
* * *
He had two more weeks in the hospital before transferring to the rehab center, and his therapist was a man who looked frail but turned out to have an implausible wiry strength. He was short, and - Aaron quickly ascertained - bored. He didn't much like his job, or his patients, or his boss, or the hospital, or his life.
This was Jayden. He didn't talk much, but once again, Aaron found he didn't need that.
And with Jayden, he was able to confirm what could have been guesses or hunches.
His sixth sense told him Jayden was single, dumped by a girl nearly a year ago, and still hurt over it.
"So, Jayden, I'm out of my mind with boredom in here. What's your life? Wife? Kids?"
A grunt, negative. Knee flexes. Jayden moved Aaron's body for him, finding the limits of his flexibility.
"No? Gotta be a girlfriend though, right?"
Grunt, negative, with emphasis.
"How can that be?"
Jayden sighed and moved Aaron around for arm stretches.
"Had a college sweetheart but we broke up last year. Just wasn't right."
Aaron saw through it. It wasn't right for her. She left Jayden for... a taller man. A white guy.
"Bummer. I guess that's the way it goes sometimes," Aaron said, keeping it very light, but dropping an invitation into the quality of his voice.
"I carried a torch for her for a while," Jayden said. "Thought she'd get it out of her system, come back. But she didn't."
The white guy was rich. Or doing better than Jayden anyway. He was angry. Angry she left him. Angry it was a white guy. Thought she was a whore chasing money. Not the girl he thought she was.
Aaron wondered how much of that was true, and how much of that was Jayden's anger. He realized he couldn't tell that difference. He could see Jayden's story, but not whether it was a true story or not.
Before he realized it, he went out on a limb.
"I think my nurse likes you, though."
He didn't think that. But he thought maybe he could bring it about.
"What nurse?"
There were many, and the shifts constantly rotating. But of course, Aaron meant Holly, the buxom girl who he'd witnessed, whose secret he held, and who, by this day's good fortune, was on shift. She had arranged for the orderly to take him to rehab, except that orderly had never shown up, so Jayden had graciously come to get Aaron himself.
Jayden looked skeptical.
"No, seriously, man. I saw the way she looked at you."
