Cold Cold Heart by Tami Hoag Read Free Book Online Page A

worked with in Minneapolis had come to visit once, then never again. They had come with a cheery, party attitude, bringing DVDs of their days in the newsroom with footage of Dana doing her job, of the staff at parties, things they wanted her to remember. But seeing her former self on television served only to upset her. She didn’t remember being that girl. She didn’t remember being happy and sweet. And she certainly didn’t feel any connection to the pretty face with the sunny smile.
    The pressure of her coworkers’ expectations and their disappointment in her reaction to them had been too much for her. The emotional tidal wave had rolled over her, and she had become panic-stricken and violent, throwing things and shouting at them to leave.
    They hadn’t returned. Her mother, ever the diplomat trying to smooth over the jagged edges, had told her it was the distance that deterred them. Minneapolis was a long way away from Indianapolis. When Dana countered with the fact that airplanes regularly flew between the two places, her mother changed tacks to the fact that people in the news business were very busy and couldn’t get away as much as they liked.
    â€œWe hardly saw you after you moved to Minneapolis,” she pointed out. “You were so busy! Remember?”
    No. She didn’t remember. And that was the whole point, wasn’t it? If she didn’t remember those people, why should they remember her? They would rather stay in Minneapolis with the memories of Before Dana, the Dana Nolan they had known, than deal with the reality of After Dana, the Dana Nolan she was now.
    Dana wished she had that choice. Or, if not that choice, then at least the ability to make them understand what it was like to live inside her head. But not even the doctors who worked with brain-injured people every day could truly get what that was like.
    Tired of thinking about it, Dana pushed the covers back and got out of bed. Stiffness and aches growled and barked through her body like a pack of angry dogs. The fractures and lacerations and contusions had all healed, but their aftereffects remained. In particular her right knee and the once-mangled fingers of her left hand remembered what had been done to them even if Dana’s brain didn’t.
    She went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and climbed in under the hot water, remembering too late that she was supposed to take her clothes off first. She peeled off her now-sodden T-shirt and flannel boxer shorts and dropped them in a heap that immediately acted as a plug over the drain. The water began pooling around her feet as she shampooed her short hair, then washed herself, then shampooed her hair again, then washed herself. She rinsed and repeated not because the shampoo bottle said to, but because she didn’t remember she had already done it.
    Her thoughts were elsewhere. She was going home today.
    The wet clothes were forgotten as she left the shower stall and went to the sink. The notes on the mirror told her to towel herself off, reminded her to brush her teeth, to comb her hair. Dana didn’t look at the notes. Her attention was on the dripping-wet stranger staring back at her.
    The first time she had been allowed to look at herself in a mirror after waking up from the coma, she had not been able tocomprehend that she was seeing an image of herself. She didn’t remember knowing anyone who looked like this. The face staring back at her was something from a nightmare or a zombie movie.
    The right side of the bald skull was flat and pitched like the angle of a roof, a huge section of bone having been temporarily removed to alleviate the pressure on her swelling brain. The face was bruised and cut and stitched back together like an abused rag doll. The features seemed misshapen and asymmetrical. The right eye was covered with a patch.
    Confused, Dana had stared at the creature in the mirror for a long while without saying anything. She looked