Chapter 2 - Fourteen Days Missing
The last thing I remembered before the hospital was buying strawberries. Not screaming. Not my father’s voice. Not concrete beneath my body. Strawberries.
I remembered standing in a grocery aisle holding the expensive organic box in one hand and the cheaper one in the other, arguing with myself like a woman whose life was still ordinary. Then I opened my eyes under white lights, and a nurse whispered, “She’s opening her eyes,” as if the words might break me.
Pain arrived slowly, piece by piece. My jaw. My ribs. My wrist. The back of my head. Then came the fog, thick and gray, where fourteen days should have been. I tried to sit up and nearly cried from the effort.
A doctor asked my name.
“Rebecca Hayes.”
My birthday.
I answered.
The year.
I got that wrong first.
He asked when I had last seen my father. I said Sunday dinner, because that was the last safe answer my brain could find. The nurse looked away.
That was when I knew something had happened that everyone else remembered and I did not.
The doctor showed me the X-rays on a tablet. Left cheekbone fracture. Three broken ribs. A cracked wrist. Severe concussion. Bruising he described in careful medical language that somehow made it sound even worse.
“Was it a car accident?” I asked.
He did not answer fast enough.
Finally, he said, “The police report places the assault inside your parents’ garage.”
I laughed once because the sentence was too stupid to be real. My parents’ garage was where Dad kept motor oil, lawn tools, old Christmas bins, and the cooler we used for family picnics. It was not a place where daughters became police reports.
Then my mother walked in.
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For one second, I thought I was saved.
I was wrong.
