Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Juliet’s pov

The first thing I knew was the light.

It was white and flat and it hurt behind my eyes, and when I tried to turn my head away from it a sharp pain went through my skull and I made a sound that did not seem to belong to me.

“She is waking up,” someone said in Italian, in a flat, tired voice, and I understood the words.

I opened my eyes again and found a tiled ceiling, a metal pole with a bag hanging from it, and a thin tube taped to the back of my hand.

My mouth was so dry that my tongue stuck to the roof of it, my left hip burned, and my head was wrapped tightly in a bandage.

“Miss George, can you hear me?” a nurse asked, leaning over me with a plastic cup and a straw.

Miss George?

I drank, and then I looked at her and asked the only thing I could think of.

“Who is Miss George?”

The nurse’s face went pale, and she looked toward someone I could not see and said sharply, “Call Doctor Costa, now.”

Doctor Elena Costa came in within a minute, a calm woman in her forties with tired eyes, and she shone a small light into each of my eyes.

“Can you tell me your name?” she asked in English, in a slow, steady voice that was meant to keep me calm, and it almost did.

I opened my mouth and waited for it to come, and nothing came, and my chest began to hurry, and the machine beside me beeped faster.

“I do not know my name,” I said, and my voice cracked, and saying it out loud made it real, and my whole body went cold.

She told me, slowly, that my name was Alice George, that I was twenty eight years old, and that I had been in a car accident five days ago and had been unconscious ever since.

Alice George.

I said it silently to myself, and it did not feel like mine.

“What about your family, your home, your work?” she asked.

I closed my eyes and searched, and there was nothing, no face, no street, no room, and the panic climbed my throat so fast that I gripped the sheet with both hands.

“Do you remember the accident?” the doctor asked gently.

“No,” I said, and I searched anyway, and found nothing at all, not a sound, not a face, not one second of it.

“A black car struck you on a narrow street near the old quarter,” she said.

“A little girl ran into the road, and you pushed her out of the way, and the car hit you instead.

She is unharmed.”

I stared at her, because she was describing something brave, and it felt like it belonged to a stranger, and I felt nothing about it, and that frightened me more than the pain did.

Who was I, that I would run in front of a car for a child, and not even know it now?

Then the door burst open.

Three people came in.

The first was a tall woman of about fifty with sharp cheekbones and a black coat, holding her handbag tightly in front of her.

The second was a younger woman, a little older than me, with her hair tied back and a face trained to show nothing.

The third stopped just inside the door, a man in a dark suit with his hands in his pockets.

“Five days I have sat in this hospital because of you,” the older woman said, spitting out every word, her lip curled as if each of those days had been a punishment she had not earned, and it was clearly obvious from her face and her tone that she did not want to be here.

Who is she? I thought.

Why is she angry with me?

She walked to the bed and stood over me without touching me or asking how I felt.

“Do you have any idea what you have done?

The press has been outside these doors since the morning after.

The board is asking questions about the woman Mr. De Luca is about to marry, and I have had to lie to every one of them.”

I understood none of it, and I had never felt so small.

“I do not remember,” I said in a shaking voice, and I hated how weak I sounded.

“I do not know who you are.”

“Do not start with me,” she hissed, leaning down until her face was close to mine, and her perfume was so heavy that it made me feel sick.

“Running into the road after a child who is not even yours, in front of cameras, like a servant.

If you had died, the engagement would have died with you and I would have lost everything, and you would have done it on purpose, because you have always been ungrateful.”

On purpose?

I had nearly died, and she was angry that it was inconvenient.

“Mother,” the younger woman said quietly from behind her, so quietly that I almost missed it, “she can barely sit up.”

“Be quiet, Violet,” the older woman snapped, and she did not even turn her head.

Violet shut her mouth, and her eyes met mine for one second, and I saw something in them that looked like an apology, before she dropped her gaze.

She wants to help me, I thought, and she is afraid to.

“Madam,” Doctor Costa said, standing, her voice firm now, “she has a serious head injury, and I must ask you to lower your voice.”

“Convenient,” the older woman said, with a small, ugly smile.

Convenient?

What kind of human said that to another human who had just woken from five days of unconsciousness?

She reached out, took my chin between her fingers, and turned my face toward her, and her nails dug into my skin.

“Do not play the poor little amnesia girl with me, Alice,” she said softly, and her breath was hot on my face.

“It will not work on me.”

I could not move, and what I felt was not only fear but cold astonishment.

No one had asked if I was in pain, no one had touched my hand, and no one had said thank God you are alive.

These were the people who were supposed to take care of me, and the first thing they had done was count what I had cost them.

Was this how I had lived?

“Who are you to me?” I asked, and my voice was small, but it was steady, and her eyes flickered.

She let go of my chin and laughed, a short, dry laugh with no humor in it.

“I am your stepmother, and I am the only reason you have ever eaten a meal since your father died,” she said, and she said it proudly, as if it were a debt I still owed her.

My stepmother?

Then the quiet woman was her daughter, and the word family did not sit comfortably with any of them.

Behind her, Violet’s hand trembled once, and she held it still with her other hand

Then the man in the doorway took one step forward, and the older woman saw him, and everything about her changed.

“Mr. De Luca,” she said, turning, her voice suddenly soft and worried, “she has only just woken.”

It happened so fast that my stomach turned, and I did not know which of her faces was the real one, the cruel one or this one.

He did not answer her. He was looking at me.

He was tall, with dark hair and a sharp, pale face, and his eyes were a blue so bright that I could not look away from them, and I did not understand why my heart was beating so hard.

“Leave us,” he said, very quietly.

My stepmother smiled tightly and went out, and I heard her heels on the corridor floor.

Who is this man, I thought, that even she obeys him?

Violet followed her, and at the door she looked back at me once, a long, careful look that I could not read.

The door closed, and Doctor Costa said she would be just outside.

Then it was only the two of us, and the man who had not taken his hands out of his pockets walked to the foot of my bed and stopped.

He did not sit and he did not smile, and he studied my face for a long moment, and the monitor beside me gave away every beat of my fear.

“Who are you?” I asked, and my voice shook in spite of me.

“Your fiancé,” he said after a long pause, and nothing in his face, his voice, or his hands said that he was glad I was alive.