FALLING FOR MR DOMINIC IN 30 DAYS

Chapter 3

The neurological assessment confirmed it Wednesday morning.

Two years. Gone cleanly, the way it apparently goes sometimes. Not fractured. Not partial. Just absent, like someone had torn the pages straight out of the back of a book. Dominic Crane remembered everything up to roughly twenty-six months back with total clarity: the company, the early grinding years, the specific deals that had made him who he was, the people he'd known before the gap opened up. What he didn't remember was the engagement. He didn't remember whoever he'd become over those two missing years.

The doctors walked him through it carefully, and he took it in with the stillness of a man hearing something he'd already half suspected.

Marisol wasn't in the room for that conversation. She read the updated notes at the start of her Wednesday shift and sat with them a minute before heading down to check on him, the words *retrograde* and *extent unconfirmed* sitting oddly next to each other on the page, clinical language trying to hold something that wasn't clinical at all.

He was awake when she walked in. Had probably been awake most of the day, judging by his face, which had the particular worn look of somebody who'd been thinking too hard for too long and hadn't found anywhere good to put it down.

"Good evening." She kept her voice at the register she used with every patient, warm but even. "How are you feeling?"

He looked at her with dark, careful eyes. "You were here last night."

"I'm nights. I check in every few hours."

"No, I mean, earlier. When I first came up out of it." A pause. "You were the first thing I saw clearly."

She went to check his monitors, hands steady, not letting anything in her face move. "You were still coming out of the anesthesia. That can mess with your head a little."

"I called you Genevieve."

She didn't break stride. "You were confused. Happens a lot after surgery."

He went quiet, watching her, and she could feel it, that particular attention of a man used to reading rooms and people, aimed squarely at her now instead of a boardroom.

"They told me about the memory loss."

"I read the notes."

"Two years."

"Yes."

He looked toward the window, where the city kept doing its nighttime thing, lit up and indifferent, the way it always was, cabs and windows and somebody's life going on eleven floors below his. "Strange, knowing something's missing but not being able to feel the shape of it. Can't exactly miss what I can't remember."

She finished with the monitor and turned to actually look at him, which was something she let herself do. Not every nurse did. Seven years had taught her the difference patients could feel between being looked at and being handled, and how much it mattered which one they got.

"Might be easier that way, in a sense."

"Or harder." A pause. "Doctors say it might come back. Pieces of it. Eventually." Another pause, longer. "So I'm just waiting to find out who I've been for two years."

"That sounds unsettling."

"Clarifying, actually." Something moved through his expression, not quite a laugh but close to the shape of one. "You spend years building a life and then one day you're looking at it from outside, seeing the whole frame of the thing. What's holding it up. What isn't." He looked at her. "Does that make any sense?"

"More than you'd think."

He almost smiled, a little further than the night before. "You're pretty direct for someone being this careful."

"I'm not being careful."

"You are." No judgment in it at all. "Picking every word. It's fine, I like precision." He shifted against the pillows, and she watched him work through the pain of it without a single sound escaping. "What's your name, by the way?"

"Marisol. Marisol Vega."

"How long have you been a nurse, Marisol?"

"Seven years, this floor."

"Do you like it?"

The question caught her a little off guard. Patients asked plenty of things, about their meds, their odds, when they'd get to go home. Almost nobody asked if she liked the work itself, like the work was a thing separate from the body it was performed on.

"Yes." She meant it. "I do."

"Why?"

She thought about that a second. "Because it's real. What you do either helps somebody or it doesn't. No gray area in it."

Something shifted behind his eyes she couldn't quite read. "Built a company for the same reason. Wanted the work to be real." He paused. "Guess somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like that."

She didn't push him to explain. Wasn't hers to ask. But she filed it away anyway, the strange honesty of a man with two years missing who, without the usual performance most people carried around like armor, was just, suddenly, true.

"You should try and sleep. There's another assessment in the morning."

"I know." He didn't shut his eyes. "You on tonight?"

"Yes."

"Good," he said, plain and settled, like that fact alone had solved something that had been bothering him.

She updated the chart and started toward the door.

"Marisol."

She turned back.

"Thank you. For last night. For staying."

She held his eyes a second, long enough that it stopped being professional and started being something else she didn't have a name for yet.

"Get some rest," was all she said.

Out in the hallway she put her back against the wall and just breathed for a minute, thinking about ten thousand dollars sitting in her account and a positive test in a bathroom and the look on his face when he thanked her for staying, like she'd handed him a gift instead of let a lie stand there quietly getting bigger.

She went and checked her other patients. Vitals, charts, the small ordinary business of the floor that didn't stop just because her own conscience had.

Told herself she wouldn't think about Room 14 for the rest of the shift.

Failed at that completely, and knew she would before she'd even finished the sentence in her head.