As she started reading, I crept over to Newt. “Thanks for this. I know it wasn’t part of the plan to bring her here, but?—”
He cut me off. “It’s fine. Our John Doe can use all the visitors he can get. Your little girl is very well behaved. A lot of kids get freaked out by medical stuff.”
“Yeah, I was afraid of that, too. She’s more sympathetic than I was at that age.”
“Dad! Dad!” Melody’s shouts interrupted our conversation.
“Shh, Melody,” I quickly ran to her side. “What is it?”
She smiled at me. “You were right. Reading helped him get better.”
“Huh?”
I looked to where she was pointing. There on the bed lay the John Doe, just like always, but there was one difference.
His eyes were open.
CHAPTER 14
Mia
I was…awake?
It was hard to say for sure. When I first opened my eyes, everything was so hazy that it felt more dreamlike than any dream I’d ever experienced. There was a man and a child, neither of whom I knew. Both stared at me with such similar expressions of shock that I knew they had to be related.
“See, Daddy,” the girl said eagerly, confirming my suspicions. “The reading really did help.”
“Yeah,” the man nodded distractedly, though he was already leading the girl away from me. “It did help. Now that you’ve done such an excellent job, we should let the nurses take over from here.”
Even as he spoke, another man approached me. This person was smaller, with red hair, and dressed in hospital scrubs.
“Hello, I’m Newt,” the man, who was apparently a nurse, said as he leaned over me and looked directly into my eyes. “Can you tell me your name?”
Awareness of my body came back one piece at a time, in a seemingly random order. My left knee was itchy. There was an uncomfortable kink in my right shoulder blade, and both of my ears felt hot, like I’d been out in the sun too long.
My throat was definitely not on the list of working body parts, so when I tried to speak, my voice came out like the scrape of rusty nails over concrete.
“I’m… Mia.”
It was just two words, but each one tore my throat raw. I couldn’t feel or taste any blood, but speaking hurt so much that I couldn’t imagine it wasn’t injured in some way. Surely, if I kept talking, I’d end up spraying blood right out my lips, yet the nurse kept asking questions.
What was my full name?
What was the last thing I remembered?
Did I know where I was?
How did I get hurt?
Did I have any family?
Did anything hurt?
I didn’t answer anything, but the last question made me laugh. The laugh turned into more of a cough deep in my chest, but I couldn’t make myself stop.
Hurt?
Yeah, of course it hurt. Somehow, before I even became fully aware of my body, I instinctively knew that everything hurt. With each new nerve ending that came alive, I was unsurprised to find that I was right.