Chương 9
He held it.
Turned it over.
Inside, engraved in tiny letters, were the words Still choosing.
Daniel squinted.
“What does that mean?”
Emily smiled faintly.
“You picked it.”
“Why?”
“You said forever sounded like marketing.”
“That sounds unbearable.”
“You were.”
He ran his thumb over the engraving.
“Still choosing.”
“Yeah.”
“Did yours say the same?”
Emily pulled the chain from under her shirt.
Her own wedding ring hung from it.
Daniel looked surprised.
“You already had yours?”
“We bought them together.”
She removed the ring from the chain and handed it to him.
Inside were the same words.
He placed both rings in his palm.
“Did we decide this because of the time you moved out?”
“Yes.”
Daniel looked at the gold circles.
“Then these aren’t promises.”
Emily thought about it.
“No.”
“They’re reminders.”
“I think so.”
He nodded.
“That’s better.”
She did not ask what he meant.
He kept his ring on the bedside table.
The following morning, he gave it back.
“I don’t want to lose it.”
Emily took it.
The disappointment was childish.
She hid it badly.
Daniel noticed.
“I’m not rejecting you.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“I want to.”
She waited.
“I don’t remember choosing you.”
Emily looked at the ring.
“I know.”
“If I put that on because everybody tells me I already chose, that feels like cheating.”
Her eyes burned.
Daniel looked miserable.
“I’m sorry.”
“No.”
“I know it hurts.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know how to fix that.”
“You don’t.”
He nodded.
Emily closed her fingers around the ring.
The same way she had in the chapel.
Only now Daniel was awake.
That made it harder, not easier.
He went to inpatient rehabilitation twelve days after the crash.
The wedding flowers were dead by then.
Father Michael had taken the last white rose arrangement from the hospital and brought it to Carol’s house because Carol could not stand to throw it away. The petals browned. The water turned cloudy. Eventually Rachel dumped them while her mother was at the grocery store.
Carol cried when she found the empty vase.
Then she yelled at Rachel for not buying milk.
Life had begun moving again in inconvenient directions.
Emily returned to work three days a week.
She worked as a project manager for an architectural firm in Baltimore, a job that had seemed stressful before the accident because contractors missed deadlines and clients changed bathroom finishes after ordering tile.
On her first morning back, her coworker Luis left coffee on her desk and said, “I’m not asking how you are.”
“Thank you.”
“I am asking whether you still remember the Brenner drawings exist.”
She stared at him.
“Unfortunately.”
“Good. Welcome back.”
At lunch, someone from accounting asked whether she and Daniel were legally married.
The woman realized the question was terrible halfway through asking it.
Emily rescued her.
“No.”
“Oh.”
“We stopped the ceremony.”
“Right.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not.”
“No, the question is okay.”
The woman nodded too many times.
Then they both stared at their salads.
That was the new social problem.
People did not know what to call Daniel.
Fiancé seemed both true and strange.
Husband was wrong.
Boyfriend was insulting.
At the rehabilitation hospital, staff usually called Emily “family,” which annoyed Carol for reasons she could not articulate.
Daniel began remembering more.
His childhood returned in clusters.
His college roommate.
A terrible summer job installing fences.
His first car.
His father’s death six years earlier.
He remembered the nonprofit fundraiser where he met Emily.
He remembered complaining about the wine.
He remembered her red shoes.
He did not remember asking for her number.
When he told Emily, she laughed.
“You didn’t ask.”
“I didn’t?”
“I gave it to you.”
“Bold.”
“You had been hovering for forty minutes.”
“I was networking.”
“You were holding an empty plate.”
Daniel smiled.
“I remember the shoes.”
“I threw them away.”
His face fell with exaggerated disappointment.
“Then why recover?”
The humor arrived before the deeper memories did.
Emily learned to be grateful for that.
But there were difficult things too.
Daniel became impatient with therapy.
He accused Monica of treating him like a child after she stopped him from walking unassisted.
He threw a foam exercise ball against the wall when he could not remember a sequence of numbers.
He apologized twenty minutes later, then became angry when Monica accepted the apology without telling him it did not matter.
“It matters,” he said.
“I know.”
“You’re acting like it doesn’t.”
“I’m acting like we have twenty-five minutes left and you still need to finish the exercise.”
Daniel hated her for an afternoon.
The next day he asked if she could be assigned to him permanently.
Emily watched these contradictions with a strange tenderness.
He was not becoming nicer because he had nearly died.
That would have been easier to explain.
He was becoming himself under different pressure.
One evening, he asked Emily to bring his laptop.
She did.
“What do you need?”
“Work email.”
Her stomach tightened.
Daniel worked in commercial real estate finance. Before the accident he had been a senior associate at a regional firm and had been preparing for a promotion.
“You’re not supposed to work yet.”
“I’m not going to work.”
“You said work email.”
“I want to see what happened.”
“What happened is you got hit by a truck.”
“At work.”
“On the way to the florist.”
“During work hours.”
“You had taken the afternoon off.”
Daniel looked at her.
“How do you know?”
“Because you complained for two weeks that your boss kept emailing.”
He opened the laptop.
His inbox had hundreds of unread messages.
The firm had sent kind notes, administrative forms, disability paperwork, insurance information, and eventually a message explaining temporary medical leave.
Daniel’s hands slowed.
“What?”
He opened an email.
Emily watched his face.
“They gave my accounts to Mark.”
“That makes sense.”
“Mark’s an idiot.”
“You remember Mark?”
“Yes.”
“That’s encouraging.”
“It’s not encouraging that Mark has my accounts.”
She sat beside him.
May you like
“Daniel.”
He opened another message.
