So Dark The Night. Margaret Daley

drawl. What did he look like? She tried to imagine him from the way his voice sounded, but it was useless. He could be twenty-five, forty or sixty. She couldn’t tell by the mere sound of his voice. Frustration churned her stomach. As a photographer, her profession centered around the visual, and she had no idea what the man talking to her looked like.

      He cleared his throat. “Is there a reason you wanted me to stay?”

      Emma heard her mother’s voice from the hallway. Heat scored her cheeks as she thought of all the people in the corridor listening to her mother and father fight. Their marriage and breakup—in fact, all her mother’s three other ones—had played out in the tabloids, making her promise to herself never to have her life plastered before the public like her mother’s. She preferred being behind the camera, not in front.

      Emma licked her dry lips and said, “No particular reason. I just—” She couldn’t admit to this stranger that she’d had a sudden fear of being left alone with only darkness around her. She’d always been afraid of the dark and now she lived in it. A tremor of alarm quaked through her.

      His footsteps approaching the bed made her tense, her fingernails digging into her palms. The scraping of a chair nearby echoed through her mind, ridiculing her with how helpless she was, lying in this bed.

      “I’ll stay as long as you want me to.”

      Kindness coated his words, causing a spurt of anger to well inside her. “To appease your guilty conscience?”

      “Yes and no,” he replied slowly as though considering his answer carefully. “I tried to avoid you on the highway, but you spun into my path. That’s something I’ll have to live with.”

      “No, that’s something I’ll have to live with.” She wasn’t quite ready to let go of her anger—not necessarily directed at the man beside her bed.

      He released a long sigh. “I’m here because I sense you need someone to talk to.”

      Regretting her words, she closed her eyes and searched her mind for any hint of what had happened the night before. Nothing. All she could recall about yesterday was driving from New York, the wind blowing through her hair, the sun beating down on her. She’d felt free, escaping the hectic pace of her life as a photographer to the stars, thrust into the limelight almost as much as the people she took pictures of. She’d spent the whole day enjoying being by herself for once. That was why she had chosen to drive instead of fly. Now all she sought was not to be by herself—alone with her thoughts, her fears, her grief.

      “When I was shot—” She touched her bandaged shoulder, still shocked at the turn of events.

      “Yes?”

      His gentle voice, sprinkled with the Southern drawl, urged her to talk. “The sheriff told me they don’t have any leads. You didn’t see anyone?”

      “No. I understand from the sheriff that you don’t remember what happened.”

      “Nothing.” Tears that were so close to the surface sprang into her eyes. “The police think I might have seen something, but what good is it? I don’t remember.” The throbbing in her head intensified with each effort to recall what had happened. She massaged her temples, rubbed her sightless eyes.

      “Sometimes it’s best not to push it. Your memory will come back when you’re ready.”

      “If I saw something to help—” Her tears strangled the flow of words, her mouth as arid as Death Valley.

      She swallowed several times, and still she couldn’t finish what she’d wanted to say. Wet tracks coursed down her face. She swiped at them, turning away from the stranger sitting next to her. The tight lump in her throat made it impossible to get a decent breath.

      He placed his hand over hers. “Your mind’s blocking the memories for a reason. Concentrate on getting well instead of remembering. It’ll come when you’re ready to handle it.”

      The feel of his touch centered her. She inhaled deeply until her lungs were full of rich oxygen and her heart returned to a normal beat.

      For a long moment silence reigned. Emma noticed that her parents’ voices couldn’t be heard anymore. Relief flowed through her like a river swollen with rainwater. She couldn’t deal with them right now. In the past it had taken so much of her emotional strength to handle the conflicting feelings surrounding her parents. She loved her mother, but the great Marlena Howard drained her emotionally.

      And your father? an inner voice asked. She didn’t know what she felt for her father. He’d left when she was eight. Memories of loud fighting and slamming doors inundated her. She shoved those away before they overpowered her.

      The reverend’s hand over hers squeezed gently. “You need time to heal.”

      Emma drew in a deep breath. The broken pieces of her life lay scattered about her. Heal? Where did she start? She expelled her breath slowly between pursed lips. “There’s so much that’s happened.” She faltered at the vulnerability that sounded in her voice. She didn’t know this man. Always before she’d held herself apart from others. So much was shifting, altering what was her life. How was she going to proceed without her dear brother, without her sight, her work? That was what defined her.

      “When life seems overwhelming, I find it’s best to think only of the immediate present.”

      “Take it one day at a time?”

      “I know it’s a cliché, but it’s good advice.”

      His hand slipped away and for a brief moment she wanted to snatch it back, to clasp it and never let it go. A lifeline? Panic began to nibble at her brittle composure. She didn’t depend on anyone—hadn’t since—

      “When are you leaving the hospital?”

      She grasped on to the reverend’s question, turning her thoughts away from that past best forgotten, from that looming future. “The doctor said I can go home tomorrow.” Home? Where was that? Her apartment in New York? Her mother’s? She shook. She clenched her hands to keep them from trembling.

      “Then you’ll be leaving Crystal Springs tomorrow?”

      “No,” she said without thinking, the word wrenched from the depth of her being. The pounding in her head magnified tenfold. “I don’t know what I’m going to be doing.”

      “You shouldn’t be alone.”

      “That’s what my father and mother say, but I can’t go with either one of them. They’ll make me feel like a rope in a tug-of-war game.”

      “Where do you live?”

      “I have an apartment in Manhattan.”

      “Is there anyone who can stay with you?”

      Emma thought of her so-called friends and couldn’t think of a single person she would want to ask. She’d always been a private person who traveled a lot for her work. It had been difficult to maintain friendships, especially when she found so many people only wanted to get to know her because of her parents. She worked and lived with many people around her, but they were really only acquaintances or employees. Suddenly, the lonely existence of her life taunted her.

      “No, there isn’t anyone I could ask.” She didn’t want to go to New York and be subjected to her acquaintances’ pitying looks, which she wouldn’t be able to see. The idea of holing herself up in her apartment didn’t appeal to her, either. “I don’t know what I’m going to do after I leave the hospital.”

      “And your parents aren’t an option.”

      “You’ve got that right.” It hadn’t really been a question, but she answered anyway, needing to emphasize to herself how impossible it would be to live with either of her parents while recovering. “You saw them. Neither one’s thinking about Derek, about—” Emotions she didn’t want to feel swelled into her throat, knotting her words into a huge ball. Her older brother had been the one person