FALLING FOR MR DOMINIC IN 30 DAYS

Chapter 2

Morning came the way it always did after a night shift. Not like relief. Like a marker sliding past, the sky going from black to slate to that flat, unpromising white a New York winter throws at you when it has nothing good to say.

Marisol hadn't slept.

She'd finished the shift, handed off to days, changed out of her scrubs in the locker room, and then just sat on the bench with her bag in her lap. Eleven minutes. Not thinking. Not moving. Just letting the weight of the last six hours sit on her chest instead of managing it, for once, the way she usually did.

Then, somehow, she was back on her feet, bag over her shoulder, walking toward the floor instead of the exit.

She told herself it was because she'd forgotten to note something on a chart. A lie. She went back because she needed to see Room 14 in daylight. Needed it to be a room again. Not the exact spot where she'd made the worst decision of her career.

Patricia, the day nurse, calm as ever, was just outside the door when Marisol passed the window. Dominic was awake. Fully. Sitting up against the pillows, talking to Patricia with the slow, deliberate care of a man testing whether his own words still worked after a long stretch of not needing them.

Nothing like the half-conscious man who'd grabbed her wrist in the dark.

He was, and she registered this with about as much professional distance as she could manage, an objectively good-looking man. Dark eyes. A jaw sharp enough to open doors before the money ever did. In pain, too, clearly, and handling it with the particular stubbornness of someone who wasn't going to let weakness show if he had any say in it. She could see it in his shoulders. In the deliberate flatness of his expression.

Patricia said something and he almost smiled. Didn't quite land. You could see the intention getting there, though.

Marisol kept walking.

In the elevator, halfway down, her phone rang. Genevieve. Two full rings before she picked up.

"He's awake." Not a question. She'd clearly already gotten that from someone on days. "I'm coming at eight."

"Visiting hours don't start till nine."

"I'm his fiancée." A beat. "I'll be there at eight."

"Doctors have him down for assessment at eight-thirty. You'd have to wait through that."

A longer pause this time. Marisol could practically hear the math running behind it.

"Fine. Nine." Then, "But I need ten minutes with you first."

"I'm off shift."

"I know. Ten minutes." Something shifted, not softer exactly, just different. "Please."

Marisol shut her eyes for a second. "Ground floor café."

Second coffee. Didn't need it, drank it anyway. Genevieve walked in looking impeccable all over again, cream coat, hair smooth, the pregnancy test from the night before folded right back into the seamless surface of her life like it had never happened. She sat down across from Marisol, ordered nothing, and folded her hands on the table like she was closing a deal.

"The doctors spoke to me this morning. Before I called you."

"About the memory loss."

"Yes." She looked down at her own hands. "Two years. He's missing roughly two years."

Marisol had already gone through the neurological notes. Three times, actually, because details mattered to her, and she needed them lined up before anything made sense. Retrograde amnesia. Post-traumatic. Extent still to be confirmed by the full workup. Two years of Dominic Crane's life, gone, for now.

"He doesn't remember the engagement," Genevieve said.

"No."

"He doesn't remember me. Not as his fiancée, anyway. He knows who I am, we met four years ago at a company thing, he's got that much." She stopped. "But the last two years. Everything we built. It's just not in there."

Marisol studied her and mostly failed to get a read. Something in Genevieve's face might have been real grief, the specific kind that shows up when a relationship ends without your permission. Something else sat right beside it. Marisol couldn't name that part yet.

"What do you need from me?"

"He's going to ask questions. About us. The relationship. The missing years." A pause. "The doctors don't want him overloaded before the picture's clearer. Too much too fast can be, their word, destabilizing."

"That's fair."

"So for now, he asks at his own pace. The people around him keep the answers gentle." Genevieve held her eyes. "You're around him more than anyone. Every night. You'll be in that room when I can't be."

"I'm his nurse." Marisol shook her head. "I'm not going to sit there and explain your relationship to him. That's not my place."

"I'm not asking you to explain anything," Genevieve said, precise as always. "I'm asking you not to correct anything. Whoever he thinks I am, whoever he thinks you are, don't fix it. Not yet. Not till the doctors clear it."

Marisol thought about the night before. His hand on her wrist. *Genevieve. You stayed.*

She hadn't corrected that either.

Told herself it was instinct. Shock. Some two-in-the-morning logic about not upsetting a half-conscious patient.

That story wasn't holding up quite as well this morning.

"You should talk to his medical team directly," Marisol said. "If there's an actual protocol here, everyone in his care should be on the same page. Not just me."

"I've got Dr. Reeves at eleven." Genevieve stood, buttoning her coat with that same neat efficiency she brought to everything. "Wanted to talk to you first." Her eyes held. "We have an understanding."

Not a question.

Marisol didn't answer it like one.

Genevieve left.

Bad coffee. Slate February sky through the window. Two lines on a pregnancy test. Ten thousand dollars. A man who'd reached for her in the dark and believed whatever he found there.

Her mother's PT bills.

What all of it made her.

She finished the coffee, went home, set an alarm for six hours out.

Barely touched sleep for any of it.