Elisabeth Naughton - Bound

Her eyes slid shut. It couldn’t be. She’d had a long labor—over twenty-four hours. Jake had held her hand through the pain. She’d been wheeled into surgery when the labor had stopped progressing. Jake had been with her as her son was cut from her. He’d told her all about it. He’d relayed the story of Reed’s birth so many times, she could see it in her mind.

Tears pooled in her eyes. She looked at the papers again as her brain warred with what she’d been told and the facts in front of her.

There were no pictures. No pictures of her pregnancy. None anywhere in the house. Jake had told her it was because she’d hated being pregnant, that she didn’t want to remember what she’d looked like.

But there were none of her smiling in a hospital gown, either. None of her nursing her baby. She’d believed him when he’d said he’d forgotten the camera the day Reed was born.

She ran to the family room, yanked picture albums off the shelves, flipped through each page. Jake holding a newborn Reed. Jake giving him a bath. Jake feeding him his first solids. Oh, God. Jake smiling with him on his first birthday. In every picture, it was Jake. Not a single one of her and Reed until after his second birthday.

Panic washed over her. She’d always assumed she’d been the one taking the photos. She’d never even questioned it. Rubbing a hand over the pain in her chest, she tried to rationalize the moment. Couldn’t.

He was a doctor. He was her husband. She’d believed him. It had never even occurred to her not to. Why? Why would he lie?

No, no, no. This can’t be real.

On legs that threatened to give out, she made her way back into his office. Her eyes focused on an evaluation from a neurosurgeon she didn’t recognize.

DAMAGE TO THE LATERAL CORTEX OF THE ANTERIOR TEMPORAL LOBE AS A RESULT OF

SEVERE TRAUMA.

PROGNOSIS: MEMORY LOSS, POSSIBLY PERMANENT AND IRREVERSIBLE.

Permanent memory loss. Coma. Three years .

Choking back tears, she continued flipping through the forms. Her stomach pitched when she saw Jake’s signature on several of the papers. He’d been an attending physician.

Her attending physician.

No, no, no. Her husband never would have been allowed to oversee her recovery. Never. Not in a million years. She wasn’t a doctor, but she knew the rules.

Sweat beaded on her neck, trickled down her back. There had to be an explanation. Something. Anything!

She lifted each paper out of the box in an urgent need to find the truth. Questions continued to swirl in her mind, memories she wasn’t sure were real or contrived. When she drew out the last paper, the floor moved under her feet.

Her legs buckled, and she dropped into the chair. In the bottom of the box rested a photo. Her breath clogged in her throat. With shaking fingers, she extracted the picture, just as a stabbing pain cut right through her heart.

It was a photo of a young girl, roughly five years of age. She was sitting on a boat. Water sparkled behind her. Trees glinted off in the distance. A young girl with a disturbingly familiar face, a curly mop of brown hair, and the greenest eyes Kate had ever seen.

Kate’s eyes. The same shape, size, color…the same exact eyes Kate stared at everyday in the mirror.

Oh, God. Oh, God.

The air clogged in her lungs. And a place deep inside told her this girl couldn’t possibly be anything other than her daughter.

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