Chapter Thirteen – Somewhere Over The Rainbow
"I don't remember anything."
The words came out steady. Practiced. A clean white lie wrapped in enough truth to be believable.
Hudson looked at me carefully. "Nothing at all?"
"Nothing." I held his gaze without blinking. "I woke up in that forest and everything before it was just… gone. I don't know how I got there. I don't know where I came from. I don't have anything."
The last part wasn't a lie.
He was quiet for a moment, turning something over behind his eyes. I watched him process it, waiting for the doubt, the suspicion, the polite withdrawal that people always eventually offered in place of actual help.
It didn't come.
"Okay," he said simply.
I blinked. "Okay?"
"Okay." He leaned forward slightly, elbows on his knees. "So what happens when they discharge you today? Where do you go?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
Where did I go.
The question landed like a stone dropped into still water, ripples spreading outward into every corner of my chest. Where did I go. I had no address to give. No name that belonged to a life I could return to. No key in my pocket, no number to call, no person waiting anywhere who would notice my absence.
I had nothing.
I had always had nothing.
"I don't know," I admitted quietly.
Hudson nodded slowly, like he had been expecting that answer. Like he had already decided what came next before I confirmed it. He stood, straightening his jacket, and looked at me with an expression that was so uncomplicated it made my chest ache.
"Then you're coming with me."
The discharge took longer than expected. Forms, signatures, a brief reappearance of the two officers who seemed satisfied enough with Hudson's presence to release me into his care without much resistance. He handled all of it — calm, efficient, speaking to the doctors in a low voice while I sat on the edge of the bed staring at the folded clothes he had brought me days ago.
I picked them up slowly.
Unfolded them.
A soft sweater, deep burgundy. Simple trousers, dark, well-fitted. Underwear still tagged. Socks. Even shoes — simple white sneakers, clean and unassuming.
I checked the size.
Exact. Every single piece. Exact.
I set them down for a moment and stared at them.
He got it right. Not approximately right, not close enough. Exactly right. The kind of right that required either extraordinary luck or prior knowledge of a person's body.
I pushed the thought aside. I had nothing else to wear. I had nowhere else to go.
I dressed slowly, each layer feeling strange against my skin, like wearing something borrowed from a life I hadn't earned yet. When I was done I stood before the small mirror above the sink and barely recognized myself. Clean. Clothed. Almost normal.
Almost.
I walked out.
Hudson was waiting by the nurses' station, finishing the last of the paperwork. He turned when he heard my footsteps and went very still for just a moment.
Then he smiled.
It was genuine. I knew the difference — I had spent my whole life cataloguing the difference between real smiles and performed ones, between warmth and transaction. This one reached his eyes, softened the line of his jaw, changed his whole face from handsome to something warmer than handsome.
Nobody had ever looked at me that way.
Not once. Not in any group home, any hallway, any room I had ever occupied. Nobody had ever turned and seen me and smiled like my presence was something that pleased them simply by existing.
My heart did something embarrassing and immediate.
I looked away quickly, pretending to adjust the sleeve of my sweater.
Stop it, I told myself firmly. Stop it right now.
Outside, the afternoon air hit me like a small mercy — cool and clean, carrying the faint smell of rain on concrete. I stopped on the hospital steps and tilted my face up toward the pale sky.
For a moment, just a moment, I let myself breathe.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, something stirred. Not a memory exactly — more like the ghost of one. The feeling of having written a sky like this. Grey-blue and quiet, the kind of sky that existed in a story I once told myself about a girl who found something good in the middle of something terrible.
Somewhere over the rainbow, I thought distantly, where the sky is blue. There's a golden pot waiting at the end.
I exhaled slowly.
But remember. It's a myth.
"Ready?"
Hudson's voice pulled me back. He was standing beside me, patient, unhurried, watching me with that same unreadable steadiness he'd had since the hospital room.
I looked at him properly then. Really looked.
The afternoon light fell across his face at an angle that did him no justice in the ordinary sense — it did something worse. It made him look real. Painfully, impossibly real. The kind of real that belongs in stories because actual life doesn't produce it. The line of his jaw. The warmth in his eyes. The way he stood like the world could lean against him and he wouldn't move.
Something inside me went very quiet.
I've written this, the quiet part whispered. I've written him.
I didn't know what that meant yet. I didn't know why looking at him felt like reading a page I had forgotten I'd authored. But the feeling sat in my chest like a splinter — small, deep, impossible to ignore.
I snapped out of it.
Blinked. Squared my shoulders. Rebuilt the wall brick by brick in the space of a single breath.
No one can be trusted yet. Not him. Not this. Not any of it.
I had nothing and nowhere and no memory and I was about to walk into a stranger's home because the alternative was the street. That was the reality. That was all this was.
I forced a small smile. "Ready."
He led me to his car — dark, clean, unremarkable. He opened the passenger door before I reached it. I paused for half a second, caught off guard by the gesture, then slid inside.
The interior smelled faintly of coffee and something else. Something I couldn't place. Something old and papery that tugged at the edges of my mind like a word on the tip of a tongue.
I said nothing.
He got in, started the engine, pulled smoothly into traffic.
I watched the city pass outside the window, buildings blurring into each other, strangers walking lives I couldn't imagine belonging to. My reflection floated ghost-like in the glass, watching me back.
Everything is written, I thought.
The thought settled in my bones with a weight that felt like knowledge rather than fear. Like something I had always known and kept forgetting.
My heart was still flipping from that smile. My walls were still up. Both things were true simultaneously and I didn't know what to do with that.
What I did know — with a quiet, bone-deep certainty that had no logical source — was this:
I was in big trouble.
Not the forest kind. Not the hospital kind. Not the shadow-self-in-a-corridor-of-pages kind.
The worst kind.
The kind that looked like salvation and felt like home and smiled at you like you were something worth smiling at.
And I, fool that I was, could already feel myself wanting to believe it.