Chapter 1 Ruined bubble

Chapter 1

Lisa

The rain hadn't let up since I left the restaurant, and I hadn't noticed until I was already soaked through, standing in the middle of Montmore's Hospital with my hair plastered to my face and my chest heaving like I'd run the whole way here.

Maybe I had. I couldn't remember.

Seven missed calls sat frozen on my screen. Four from Tobias. Three from a number I didn't recognize, one that turned out to belong to his mother, her voice shaking through the receiver telling me the words I still hadn't fully let myself believe. Ghastly motor accident. Montmore's Hospital. Nothing after that had felt real.

"I'm looking for Tobias Thomas," I said to the nurse behind the counter, my voice cracking down the middle.

She looked up at me slowly, taking in the state of me, soaked, wild-eyed, gripping the counter's edge like it was the only thing keeping me upright, and her expression didn't change at all. "Can you calm down first? What's your relationship to the patient?"

The question hit me like a slap.

"I'm not anyone," I said, and then immediately hated how that sounded, because it was exactly what I was. Not his family. Not someone with a name in his phone that meant anything official. Just the girl he'd been kissing in secret for six months, the girl no one at school even knew existed in his world.

"Lisa."

I turned at the sound of my name and found Elizabeth a few feet away, and I don't remember deciding to run to her, my legs just did it on their own, giving out halfway there so that she had to catch me before I hit the floor.

"How is he?" I got out against her shoulder.

Her arms tightened around me, and when she spoke, her voice had already started to break. "I'm sorry, Lisa. But it's bad."

I don't remember much of the days after that. Just fragments. The word coma landing somewhere in my chest and staying there. Three days of it. His mother's face growing thinner each time I saw her. Learning the hospital's quiet corners better than anyone, the empty waiting room behind the vending machines, the spot near the stairwell where no one thought to look for the girl nobody knew was his.

I wasn't allowed to be seen. Not as his secret. Not as anything.

So I waited. And when Elizabeth finally came to find me, eyes red, voice trembling with something that sounded almost like hope, and said, "He's awake," I felt my whole body come back to life for the first time in three days.

They let his parents go in first. I stood outside that door for what felt like an hour, rehearsing everything I wanted to say, that I was sorry I missed his calls, that I loved him, that I'd been so scared I thought my heart might actually stop. By the time the door opened again, I'd almost convinced myself the worst part was already over.

Elizabeth came out crying.

Stefan looked at me with something in his eyes I didn't understand yet. "He'll see you now."

I should have noticed the wrongness in that. I didn't. I was already moving.

His room looked more like a hotel suite than a hospital ward, all soft lighting and quiet expense, and there he was, propped up against the pillows, his head turned toward the window. A sob climbed up my throat just at the sight of him, and I swallowed it down hard. He needed me steady. Not falling apart.

"Tob?" I called softly.

Nothing.

I stepped closer, smoothing my dress, fixing a smile onto my face that I didn't fully feel. "Tob?"

He turned.

And every single thing inside me broke at once, because he was here, he was alive, he was looking right at me, and none of that mattered in about four more seconds.

"Are you okay?" I asked, sitting carefully on the edge of the bed, my hands aching to reach for him.

He just stared. No warmth in it. No recognition. Just a blank, searching look that made something in my stomach twist.

"Look." I stood, giving a small, hopeful twirl. "I'm wearing your favorite dress." I tried to smile wider. "You said I looked like a mini doll once. One you could put in your pocket so I'd always be with you." My chest tightened. "Do I still look like that?"

Nothing. Not a flicker.

"I'm sorry I didn't pick up your calls," I said, my voice starting to shake. "I had my phone on silent, I was working, I didn't—"

"Who are you?"

I actually laughed, a small, disbelieving sound, because surely I'd misheard him. "Are you joking? It's me. Lisa. Your little witch."

Nothing changed in his face. Not one thing.

I took a step closer without meaning to, and his hand lifted between us,a small gesture that stopped me harder than a shout would have.

"Don't come any closer."

"Tob—"

"I said stay where you are." The words came out sharp, almost a growl, and I froze completely, hands rising in some instinctive surrender even as they trembled.

"Okay. Okay." My voice had gone thin, barely holding. "I'm not moving."

He shifted against the pillows, pain flashing across his face for a second, and every instinct in me screamed to help him. I didn't move. I couldn't. Not with him looking at me like that.

"Who did you say you were again?" His voice had gone cold. Unfamiliar.

"I'm Lisa." My throat felt like it might close entirely. "Your girlfriend."

He stared at me for a long moment. Then something shifted in his face, disbelief, sharp enough to cut.

"My girlfriend?" A short, humorless laugh left him. "I don't do that shit. And even if I did—" his eyes dragged over me slow, assessing, dismissive, "—you'd never make the list. What is this?"

Something inside me tore straight down the middle, because I knew this. I'd heard this exact tone before, this exact look, months and months ago, before any of the soft things he ever said to me existed. This was the old him. The one who used to make my life miserable just for existing near him.

"Tob, I know you—"

"Stop calling me that." His voice cracked like a whip.

I pressed my nails into my palm just to stay upright. "I'm sorry, I—"

"Just leave." His face twisted, irritation bleeding into something close to disgust. "You make me sick."

The words landed somewhere I didn't have a name for.

"What?" The word came out so small I barely heard it myself.

"Are you deaf? I said leave." He was already reaching for the call button, jabbing it hard, impatient, done with me before I'd even fully processed what was happening.

"No, please, just listen." I stepped forward despite everything screaming at me not to. "It's me. We've been together six months, you told me—"

The door burst open. Nurses flooded in, eyes flicking between us, tension filling the room in an instant.

"Get her out," Tobias said, flat, certain. "Don't let her back in."

"Tobias, please." My voice broke apart completely now. "It's me. It's your little witch—"

"Ma'am, I need you to leave," one of the nurses said, already reaching for my arm.

"No, you don't understand, he's confused, he doesn't mean—"

"Ma'am, we don't want to use force."

Hands closed around my arms, and I fought them on instinct, my whole body refusing to accept what my eyes were telling me. "Tobias!" I called out as they pulled me toward the door, my voice cracking down the center of his name. "Please don't do this. We can get through this together—"

He didn't turn.

He didn't look at me. Not once.

And somehow that was worse than every word he'd already said.

The door shut behind me, and my legs simply stopped working. I hit the floor of the waiting area and stayed there, sobs tearing out of me too fast to control.

"I'm sorry, darling. I'm so sorry." Elizabeth's arms found me immediately, but I could barely hear her over the words looping through my own head.

"He said I make him sick." I kept saying it, over and over, like repetition might make it mean something different. "He doesn't know me."

"It's not him," she whispered into my hair, her own voice breaking. "It's not him, Lisa."

But it sounded exactly like him. It felt exactly like him. And that was what made it unbearable.

The doctor found us there eventually, crouching down with the kind of careful, practiced gentleness that told me before he even opened his mouth that this wasn't going to be simple.

"He's stable," he said. "But Tobias sustained a significant head injury. He's currently experiencing memory loss, likely temporary, though we can't yet say how much is affected, or for how long."

Temporary should have sounded like hope.

It didn't.

Two weeks passed, and nothing changed. I kept coming anyway, every day, like the hospital was still the only place I belonged. I brought photographs. Notes. Every scrap of proof that we had been real, that six months of secret glances and stolen kisses hadn't just existed in my head. Elizabeth carried them in for me each time, and each time she came out looking a little more hollowed out than before.

He didn't want any of it.

He didn't want me.

"I think you should stop coming," Elizabeth told me on the fourteenth day, her own face as wrecked as mine had to be. "I'm not pushing you away, Lisa. But no mother can watch this and be okay." Her voice cracked. "He's not ready. And I can't keep watching you fall apart."

I didn't argue. There wasn't anything left in me to argue with.

That night, they let me see him one last time, asleep, color returned to his face, some of the bandages finally gone. For one quiet moment he almost looked like the boy who used to press his forehead to mine and call me little witch like it was something sacred.

I stood there a long time. Memorizing him. Grieving him, even though he was still breathing right in front of me.

If I had gotten Tobias Thomas to fall for me once, I could do it again.

"I'm waiting for you on the other side, Tobias Thomas," I whispered into the quiet, my resolve tightening through everything else still splitting me apart. "And this time, I'll make sure you fall for me in a way no accident, no matter how bad, can ever make you forget."