Love Me Again

Chapter 2: Strangers

The ambulance siren tore through the cold silence of the night like a cry no one had been waiting to hear.

Mia lay on the asphalt exactly as she had fallen — crumpled, broken, utterly still — a dark pool of blood spreading slowly beneath her like a shadow she could no longer outrun. The night carried on indifferently around her. The wind moved. The stars stayed fixed. The city hummed its distant, careless hum.

She was alone.

Or so it had seemed.

Chris Xander had not planned to be on that road at that hour.

He had been driving home from the gala — the same one, though he didn't know that yet — his mind half-present, the radio playing something low and forgettable, when his headlights swept across something on the road that made his blood go cold.

He slammed the brakes.

For a single, suspended second he sat frozen in the driver's seat, his hands gripping the wheel, staring at the figure on the ground. Then training and instinct took over and he was out of the car before the thought had fully formed, dropping to his knees on the cold asphalt beside her.

"Hey — hey, can you hear me?"

Nothing. She didn't move. Her face was turned slightly to the side, pale as paper beneath the smear of blood at her temple, her dark hair fanned out around her head like something from a painting — beautiful and devastating all at once. She was still dressed in her gown. A navy gown, now torn at the hem, now stained.

Something twisted sharply in Chris's chest.

Who leaves a woman alone on the road in the middle of the night?

He pressed two fingers to the side of her neck, holding his breath. A pulse — faint, but there. He exhaled hard.

"Okay," he said, to himself, to her, to whoever was listening. "Okay. You're going to be okay."

He grabbed his phone and dialed with shaking hands, already scanning her face as it rang. There was something about her — he had seen her before, he was almost certain of it. Earlier that evening, at the gala. She had been standing alone near the edge of the room, a champagne glass held in both hands like a lifeline, watching something across the crowd with eyes that held a very quiet, very private kind of grief. He had noticed her because she had looked so strikingly out of place — not because she didn't belong there, but because she was the only person in a room full of performers who wasn't performing.

He had thought about approaching her. He hadn't.

I should have, he thought now, absurdly.

"Come on, come on—" The call connected and he was already talking, fast and precise, rattling off the location, the condition, the urgency. "She's unconscious, there's significant head trauma, I need an ambulance right now—"

He stayed on his knees beside her the entire time he waited, one hand resting lightly near hers on the cold ground — not touching, just present. Just so she wasn't entirely alone.

When the ambulance finally arrived, lights strobing red and white across the dark street, Chris was the one who stood and said, I found her. I'm coming with her. And something in his voice left no room for argument.

The hospital was all fluorescent light and quiet urgency.

Chris sat in a waiting chair outside the ward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped together, staring at the floor. He had given them what little information he had — which was almost nothing. No name. No next of kin. He had found her small purse on the road near where she'd fallen and handed it to the nurse, hoping there was something inside that could help.

He didn't know why he stayed. He told himself it was simple human decency. He told himself anyone would have done the same.

He stayed all night.

While Chris kept vigil in that hospital corridor, across the city Edel Morgan had already arrived home.

He had gone to Selena's, of course. Because not twenty minutes after he had driven away from his wife — left her standing alone in the dark in the middle of the night — his phone had rung and Selena's voice had come through the line in breathless, fragmented pieces. She told him Mia had shown up at her door earlier that evening and said horrible things to her. Cruel things. Things that had shaken her to her core.

It wasn't true. Not a single word of it was true. Mia had not gone anywhere near Selena that night — Mia had been crumpled on a cold pavement, bleeding. But Edel didn't know that. And Selena's voice had cracked so convincingly, her breathing had become so ragged and desperate, that by the time she whispered I think I'm having a panic attack, Edel, I can't breathe— he was already reaching for his keys.

He had sat with her for hours. Held her hand. Talked her down. Made her tea.

And when he finally came home in the grey hours of early morning, he went to check on his wife the way you check on someone you are still angry at — expecting to find her curled in their bed, sulking. Performing. Doing what Mia always did when she wanted to make him feel guilty.

The room was empty. The bed untouched.

He stood in the doorway for a long moment, looking at the smooth, undisturbed covers, and felt something uneasy stir in the pit of his stomach. He pushed it down. She was probably in the guest room. She did that sometimes, when things between them got bad — retreated to the far end of the house and shut the door between them.

He prepared for work. Made breakfast. Ate it standing at the kitchen counter, the house too quiet around him, that uneasy feeling returning in small, persistent waves no matter how many times he pushed it away.

She's fine, he told himself. She's being stubborn.

But a part of him — a small, restless, inconvenient part — was worried. He just refused to call it that.

The next morning, the doctor found Chris in the hallway and delivered the news with the careful, measured tone of a man who had learned not to let the weight of what he carried show on his face.

The woman was stable. She had sustained significant trauma from the impact. She had lost the baby.

Chris went very still.

"She was pregnant?" he asked, his voice coming out quieter than he intended.

The doctor nodded. "Early stages. She may not have known." He paused. "There is also the matter of her memory. The head trauma was severe. She is conscious this morning, but she appears to have no recollection of who she is or what happened. It may be temporary." Another pause, heavier this time. "Or it may not be. At this stage, it is a fifty-fifty chance."

Chris stood in that hallway for a long moment after the doctor walked away, staring at nothing, the words settling over him like something cold and irreversible.

She lost her baby. She doesn't know who she is. And no one has come for her.

He straightened up. Rolled his shoulders back. And walked toward her ward.

The woman in the bed looked smaller than she had on the road.

She was sitting up slightly against the pillows when he pushed the door open, her dark eyes open and moving — scanning the unfamiliar room with the slow, careful alertness of someone trying to make sense of a language they don't speak. There were bandages at her temple. A fading bruise along her jaw. Her hands rested in her lap, and she was looking at them when he entered, as though she was trying to remember if they belonged to her.

Chris crossed the room quietly and settled into the chair beside her bed. When she turned to look at him, something in those dark eyes stopped him — not recognition, not warmth, just a raw, unguarded confusion that was almost painful to witness.

He reached out and took her hand gently. She let him.

"How are you feeling?" he asked.

She blinked at him slowly. "I don't know," she said. Her voice was soft, slightly hoarse. "I don't know where I am. I don't know how I got here." She looked down at their joined hands, then back up at his face. "I don't know who you are."

"My name is Chris," he said. "Chris Xander." He kept his voice low and steady, the way you speak to someone standing on uncertain ground. "I found you last night. On the road." He watched her face carefully. "You were hurt."

She absorbed this without a word, her expression moving through something complicated and quiet.

"Who are you?" she asked finally. "To me, I mean. How do we — are we—"

His mind went elsewhere for just a moment — back to that gala, to the woman standing alone at the edge of a glittering room, holding her champagne glass like it was the only solid thing in reach. That quiet pain in her eyes that he had noticed from across the room and had not been able to name.

He had wondered about her then. He wondered about her now.

She tapped his hand lightly, bringing him back.

He blinked. Refocused. "I'm nobody," he said honestly. "I'm a stranger. I saw you on the road and I stopped." He gave her hand a small, careful squeeze. "I just didn't want you to be alone."

Something moved across her face at that — something too tender and too brief to name — and she looked down again.

"No one called?" she asked quietly. "To ask about me?"

The question landed softly, but Chris felt the weight of it. He had kept her purse carefully. He had sat in that corridor all night half-expecting a panicked husband, a worried sister, a friend — anyone — to come rushing through those hospital doors asking for her. Asking where she was. Asking if she was okay.

No one had come. No one had called.

He kept his face neutral. "No," he said gently. "Not yet."

It was a small mercy — the not yet. But the flicker that crossed her face told him that somewhere beneath the fog of her lost memory, something had registered. Some wordless, bone-deep part of her understood what no one called meant, even if she couldn't explain why it hurt.

Her brow furrowed. She pressed one hand to her chest — not over a wound, just over her heart — as though something in there had just ached.

Her heart remembers, Chris thought, even when her mind can't.

"I don't even know my name," she admitted after a moment, the words coming out small and bewildered, like a child confessing something shameful.

Chris hesitated. Then he reached for her purse on the bedside table and carefully retrieved the ID card he had found inside. He looked at it for a moment before turning it toward her.

Mia Morgan. Married.

He showed her only her name. He folded his thumb carefully over the relationship status before she could see it and kept his expression easy and calm.

"Your name is Mia," he said.

She looked at the card. Looked at the name. Said it once under her breath, slowly, like she was trying on something that used to fit.

Mia.

Her eyes filled — just slightly, just at the corners — and she blinked it back quickly. She didn't know why the name made her want to cry. She didn't know why any of this felt like grief. She just knew that somewhere deep beneath the blankness, something ached in a way that felt very old, and very tired, and very much like it had been aching for a long time before the accident ever happened.

Across the hospital, in a corridor two floors above, Edel Morgan stepped out of an elevator.

He had come to see Selena's doctor. To ask about her latest results. To be the devoted, present, unwavering person he always was when Selena needed him to be. He walked with his hands in the pockets of his coat, his jaw set, his eyes forward — the picture of composed.

But the restlessness from this morning had not left him. It had followed him into the car, into the hospital, into this corridor — a low, persistent hum beneath his ribcage that he could not quite silence no matter how firmly he told himself that Mia was fine. That she was home. That she was sulking.

He turned the corner.

And stopped.

At the far end of the hallway, through the small rectangular window of a ward door, he saw her.

Mia.

She was sitting up in a hospital bed, her head bandaged, her face pale, her hand held in the hands of a man Edel did not recognize. She was looking down at something — a card, it looked like — and even from this distance, even through glass, Edel could see the way her shoulders curved inward, the way she held herself like something had been knocked loose inside her and hadn't yet been set right.

The blood drained from his face.

His hand came up and pressed flat against the wall beside him without him realizing it — steadying himself, or perhaps just needing something solid to hold onto.

Mia.