Sing You Home by Ava Hunter

Under the glow of fluorescent lights, Luke meets with Dr. Newsome to talk about Sal’s condition.

“How is she?” Luke asks, whisking sweaty palms together. “How’s Sal?”

Dr. Newsome bobs her head. “I’ll be blunt with you, Mr. Kincaid. How your wife has been surviving all these months is miraculous.”

Pride swells in Luke’s chest at the doctor’s words. That’s Sal. The fiercest and most determined woman he knows.

Dr. Newsome pauses, seeing Luke’s eyes land on Sal’s door.

Seth’s gone in ahead of Luke to prep Sal for his visit. Luke would be lying if he said he wasn’t shaking in his boots. He can’t stand the waiting. He’s itching to go in there, to see her with his own two eyes. A small part of him can’t help but dwell on what-ifs? What if it’s not her? What if Seth’s wrong?

It’d be the hardest hit Luke’s ever taken. He wouldn’t get back up.

“I’m know you’re anxious to see her, but let’s talk Sal’s health.” Newsome scans her chart. “Physically, your wife is undernourished and dehydrated. There are also the migraines, which are related to the head trauma.

“However, with time, all those are treatable. Also . . .” Newsome hesitates. “There is evidence of physical abuse, though she’s been quiet on the subject.”

The blood in his veins boils. Turning away from the doctor, Luke has to take a quick walk around the waiting room to cool down.

He’ll kill the man who raised a hand to his wife. He’s already as good as dead.

After a careful glance at Luke, like she doesn’t know whether he’ll combust right then and there, Newsome says gently, “Let’s move on to Sal’s mental state. My chief concern is the memory loss.”

“Is it permanent?” Luke asks. He’s been brought up to speed by Seth and Jace about everything that’s gone on since they found Sal in the diner. How she remembered nothing and no one, not even her name.

“It’s hard to say,” Newsome says. “We won’t know for sure until we run some tests. And even then I can’t tell for certain what she’s lost from the brain injury and what her mind has blocked out due to trauma.” Newsome purses her lips. “It’s unfortunate. She’s spent nearly a year being kept somewhere, with no memories of her past and no medical treatment. That worries me. It was not beneficial to her well-being at all. I’m not saying her memory won’t return, but the wait wasn’t good for her.”

“How do we help her remember?” Luke asks, choking down the knot in his throat.

“Here’s the thing. You don’t.” At Luke’s raised eyebrow, Newsome continues. “At least, not a full-on barrage of information. That’s not what she needs right now.”

“Okay.” Luke exhales, gripping the back of his neck. “So what do you recommend?”

“Kid gloves and a whole lotta love.” Dr. Newsome pauses as she listens to an announcement over the loudspeaker. “Your focus should be on making sure Sal can live her life. Show her where she works, introduce her to family and friends, answer her questions, stuff like that. Stuff she needs to know, day to day. You ease her in, slowly.

“However, I know that might not be so doable seeing that you’re in the public eye.” Newsome gives him a pointed look. “Are there things from the past she needs to know?”

Luke swallows, feeling the hot sting of tears in the back of his eyes. “We lost a baby. Almost a year ago.” He gives a shake of his head. “It wasn’t in the paper. Only family knew.”

“I see.” Newsome gives him a smile of sympathy. “Honestly, in this case, my advice wouldn’t be ‘just tell her’—it would be a whole plan of how to tell her and when and what to avoid.”

“What else can I do?” Luke asks, a sense of determination filling him. “Anything. Anything she needs, I’ll give it.”

“Feed her. Make her smile. Be gentle and patient. Finding her someone to talk to could do wonders.” Dr. Newsome holds up a finger. “And no stress. It’s a bitch on recovery.”

Despite everything, Luke chuckles, liking the doctor’s humor. Liking how her outrage matches his. Liking how she has Sal’s best interests at heart.

“I mean it,” Newsome continues, the smile falling away. “Stress will make the migraines worse, and her dizzy spells will continue.”

“I can do that.” He reaches out to shake Dr. Newsome’s hand. “Thank you, ma’am.”

As she turns to walk away, Newsome says, “I have all the confidence in the world she will get through this. The brain is a resilient creature. So is your wife. There’s no telling what will happen when you get her home and surround her with people who love her.”

Luke’s eyes move as Sal’s door cracks open.

“She’ll see you,” Seth says in a low voice.

Luke’s heart jumps in his chest.

It’s Sal.

It has to be.

For a long second, after he steps inside the small room, Luke’s speechless.

The woman he loves stares back at him from the hospital bed.

Haunted. Beautiful. Alive.

Sal.

Luke would know her face in the fucking dark. Every inch of her he’s traced with his hands, his mind, his heart. His constant. His whole world. His life force.

His wife.

Emotion hits Luke all at once, and he has to blink away tears, choke down the knot in his throat.

God, he wants to fall to his knees right here and now. Nothing about this makes sense, and yet, here she is. Alive and breathing and whole and so goddamn beautiful that for a long second, he can’t breathe.

But then Sal’s eyes are meeting his and suddenly he can.

He is back. Because she is.

“Sal?” he begins. “It’s me, Luke.”

He moves slowly into the room, not wanting to scare her.

Sal, looking extremely tiny in the hospital bed, sits up, her hands folded in her lap. Wires and tubes run to her arms. Her chocolate-brown hair hangs loose around her face. Her big green eyes, blank with recognition, take him in.

“Hi, Luke,” she says with a small, uncertain smile.

Luke has to steady himself on the wall when he hears her speak. It’s the same smoky voice he loved. He always said Sal’s voice was like a melody. It made him want to write a song.

Her eyes land on his wedding ring. “I hear you’re my husband.” Her smile wavers for a second before she shakes off the hint of sadness.

“You hear right.”

Her slender hands twist together. “I’m sorry. I don’t have my ring. I—”

“Don’t you worry about that.”

He keeps his voice light, jovial. Pushing through his own pain to focus on his wife.

Sal feeling bad or afraid for not remembering him is not an option. He’ll do his damnedest to make sure she knows it’s not her fault. That she knows he’ll do everything in his power to help her.

Pulling up a chair at her bedside, Luke sits. He wraps his hands around the divider bar to give them something to do since it’s taking every unholy ounce of strength he has not to touch her. He’d give anything to pull her into his arms and tell her that he loves her. That he missed her so goddamn much he thought his own heart would break a million times over. But he resists, not wanting to overwhelm or frighten her. Seth had warned him she was skittish.

Luke’s eyes brush over Sal, shocked by her weight loss, by the hellish changes she’s been through. The first time he’s seen her in nine months.

Her hospital gown has slipped off one bony shoulder, making her look extremely small and fragile. Her face is gaunt, her cheeks hollow, her hair wild and bedraggled. But none of that matters to him, because even as thin as she is, she’s as beautiful as Luke remembers.

It takes him a minute to realize she’s studying him too. Her head cocked, her narrowed eyes float around his face. When she sees Luke’s caught her, she flushes and drops her eyes.

Clearing his throat, he says, “How are you doin’?”

“I’m okay. Confused.” She lets out a little sigh. “But I guess they probably already told you everything.”

Luke nods slowly. “They did.”

His eyes roam the sterile room. It’s tiny. Depressing. Sal deserves soft sheets, a private room, a warmer gown. And flowers. A boatload of flowers. Luke wants Sal to be comfortable, but most of all he wants her to be okay.

“What do you need?” he asks. “Can I get you anything?”

“I just want to get out of here.” She leans in, conspiratorial-like. “I don’t suppose you can spring me, can you?”

Luke chuckles at the little burst of fire in Sal’s eyes. He wants her out of here too. Safe with him and back on their Tennessee farm. “Soon, I promise.”

She’s biting her lip. “And I’d . . . go home with you?”

“Nashville. That’s where we live.”

“I’m sorry.” Her eyes fill. “I don’t remember you. I don’t remember any of that.”

The rawness of her voice has Luke reaching for her. He can’t help it. The temptation to touch her is too strong, too instinctual. Gently, Luke cups Sal’s pale cheek in his palm. He lets out a shaky breath at the feel of her. She feels like heaven.

Sal tenses, but only for a second, then leans into his touch.

He thumbs his finger over the lone tear trailing down her face, over the bruise on her cheekbone. He aches to wash it all away. To take away every inch of her pain.

Luke shakes his head. “Darlin’, you ain’t got to be sorry for a thing. You hear me?”

He means it. She is safe, alive, that’s all that matters. They have all the time in the world to work on her memory. If it never returns, it wouldn’t make a difference to him. She’s still the woman he married. He loves her no matter what.

She smiles through her tears. “Everything is like puzzle pieces inside my head. The memories are so short. I can’t hang on to them.”

“We’ll figure it out, Sal.”

“We will?” Her tormented eyes turn hopeful, searching out his for merciful truth.

“I swear it.”

As he reluctantly draws his hand away from her cheek, Sal’s eyes seize on something. She lets out a little gasp. “You have one too.”

Before Luke can ask what she means, her hands snatch his. His heart flares as she cups the underside of his hand. Ever so gentle, she traces the delicately sharp words on his palm with her nail. Reading the tattoo aloud, she says, “Lead to Us.”

Her eyes flash in recognition. “They match.” She flips her own hand over, splaying slender fingers, opening it to reveal her palm. Side by side, Luke and Sal’s tattoos read All the Roads Lead to Us.

“What does it mean?” She angles her head. “I always wondered.”

His heart cracks open. He takes a minute to collect himself, to voice the words Sal’s said to him so many times before.

“We always said . . . no matter what happens, all roads would always lead to us.” His voice breaks and he looks down at his hand, still tangled with Sal’s. Wistfully, he adds, “That we’d find each other no matter how lost one of us got.”

When a needlephobic Luke asked Sal why she wanted the tattoo on the palm, one of the most painful places on the body, she replied, “So I can always hold it and feel the weight of what you mean to me.”

“Hmm.” A contemplative smile graces her face. “I like that.”

Her confused eyes have turned curious. To Luke it feels like hope.

Sal’s still in there. Somewhere.

“How long have we been married?” she asks.

“Eight years,” Luke says. “But we’ve been together since you were twenty.”

The news surprises her. “How old am I?”

“You’ll be thirty-two in July.”

Her green eyes widen. “So we were babies.”

“Something like that,” he murmurs.

“How did we meet?”

Luke smiles. It was on a hot Nashville street corner on Broadway, where he and the boys were a scrappy street corner string band busking for a dollar. Luke was in the middle of a song when he keeled over from the heat. Seth and Jace still give him shit about it until this day. But it was the best thing that ever happened to him. Because he met Sal.

He still remembers waking up to see Sal in her paramedic uniform, cool and confident, hovering over him, checking him for vitals. Her eyes were so big and green he could have drowned in them. “Welcome back, country boy,” she said with a wry smile. Her graceful fingers brushed hair from his brow. Then she barked orders for him to drink fluids, packed up her med kit, and was gone.

“The least she coulda done was give you mouth-to-mouth,” Seth joked later as they packed up their instruments.

His brother had expected him to laugh, but he didn’t. Luke was too busy thinking up ways to see Sal again. Two weeks later, he tracked her down at some dive bar, where they shared a drink and then took a drive out on some dusty country back road.

Looking back on it, he fell in love with her right there on that Broadway street corner.

“You sure you want to hear it?” Luke eyes Sal with concern. She’s tired. Dark purple bruises thumbprinted beneath her eyes. “I should let you rest.”

She smiles a sleepy smile. “You could talk while I rest. Unless you need to go?”

“Darlin’,” he says, tucking a lock of hair behind her ears, “you’re back. I ain’t leavin’ your side until you kick my ass out.”

That earns Luke half a laugh. And what a beautiful laugh it is.

So Luke talks. Sal listens, trying hard to stay awake, but he can see his drawl soothing her to sleep. Soon, Sal’s eyes are closed, her long lashes dark against her pale cheek.

Luke’s eyes stay steady on the jumping blue lines of the heart monitor. Sal’s heartbeat is a soundtrack he can’t get enough of.

The door swings open.

Luke glances up with a scowl. The first person to come through that door and wake Sal is getting one hell of an ass beating.

It’s Seth. His eyes take in the scene, Luke watching Sal sleep, her small hand in his. “Luke,” he says, his face grim. “The cops are here.”