“You know exactly what,” he said, his face grave. He gestured toward the hallway with her bag again.

She sighed and pulled herself off the sofa. Already she felt herself getting cankles and dull hair and ragged cuticles. No, she could not do this forever. He stood aside and let her go down the hall first, even though she didn’t know where she was going. But damn straight she would lead. Because leading was what she was meant to do.

“Are we going to talk about getting rid of Nikki Kill?” she asked. So casual, even though the name Nikki Kill made her insides boil.

“No,” he said. “We’re going to talk about getting rid of you.”

She stopped, causing him to nearly bump into her, and turned her deadest eyes on him. Her lips pulled back in a snarl. “I told you I’m not doing this forever.”

“I told you, I have no intention of you doing this forever.” He grinned. One tooth stood just the tiniest bit out of line with the others. His lips looked dry. “Trust me,” he said. “I have something much better in mind.”

1

THE MINUTE I stepped out of my car, I knew I should have rolled down my window before lighting up. I stank. That’s what he would say, anyway. If he remembered how much he hated my smoking.

He might or he might not. The doctors said it would be that way. He’d remember some things and not others. He would forget again things he’d remembered just the day before. He would suddenly recall something silly and unimportant, or maybe something serious and very important, but there was no way to tell what would trigger him and no way to force him to recall everything we wanted him to recall. Basically, they said, the brain was as mysterious in injury as it was in health, and we just had to learn to live with it.

I was not great at learning to live with things.

We also had to learn to live with it if he got frustrated and headachy and short-tempered and tired. He’d been through a hell of a trauma, and it would take a while to put all the pieces of Chris Martinez back together again, even if he looked whole on the outside.

Those conversations happened in the early days—the ones right after he woke up, opening bloodshot eyes in swollen, purple sockets, darting glances around the room warily, as if he had come back from the other side and wasn’t sure where, or who, he’d come back to.

Maybe I was being dramatic. Maybe Chris Martinez was behind those eyes, present and accounted for, so serve-and-protect upstanding yellow you could get a sunburn off him, and I was too distracted by the blissful release from my crimson prison to see it.