To Have and to Hold Read Online Free PDF

nothing wrong with the apartment.”
    Her voice had come out testier than she’d intended, and she saw Phoebe’s eyes narrow. “Really? Are you saying you’d rather live in that dump than a place like this?”
    That dump
.
    Her chest felt like there was lead in it, but she shoved the sensation away and went on.
    “Phoebe, hon. I’m not sure we’re even going back to the apartment. I don’t know if we can break the sublet contract, and it’s not up for another six weeks. I’m thinking we might go stay with Bonnie for a little bit.”
    Bonnie was Trina’s closest friend, someone she’d waited tables with for years at Mike’s Down Home.
    “Bonnie’s apartment smells like cigarettes and wet dog.” Phoebe was crying now. “I don’t want to go there. And Clara needs us. We can’t just leave her. You’re like her
mom
.”
    “Phoebe. Baby.” Trina hugged her tight, resting her face against the fine silk of her daughter’s hair. Under the darker scents of adolescence, she could still find the baby scent of her Phoebe, and the tenderness that sprang up in her was the deepest emotion she knew.
    She had to listen to that tenderness now, not the part of her that wanted to cling to this house and family that weren’t—and now would never be—theirs. She had to keep doing what she had always done for Phoebe—building a life for the two of them.
    “I’m not her mom.”
    The words hurt to say, but she pressed on. For Phoebe’s sake, she wanted to be matter-of-fact, to make this seem like the most normal, the safest, thing in the world. “I’m your mom. And I need to do what’s right for you and me. And right now, what’s right for you and me—and Clara and Hunter, too—is for all of us to get on with our lives. Clara needed us this year, but now she has her dad back, and they’re going to be happy. And so are we. I promise.”
    But even as she said it, even as Phoebe snuggled closer, still young enough to believe in a mother’s omnipotence, she thought of Hunter’s promise, spoken with so much conviction, felt fully in the depths of his heart, but not his to make, or keep.
    —
    “Here’s the thing.” Dr. Stephens, the neurorehab specialist Hunter had been referred to, crossed his arms over his barrel chest. “Just because you’re passing cognitive tests with flying colors and we can’t see anything on the scans doesn’t mean you didn’t have a mild traumatic brain injury.”
    Several hours of tests had brought on one of Hunter’s headaches, and he really didn’t need short, bald Dr. Stephens to tell him the news he’d just delivered. He pretty much already knew that somehow, somewhere along the way, he’d suffered a head injury.
    “I don’t have access to all your records from the field clinic or Landstuhl, which might help me get to the bottom of this, but it’s
not
uncommon to miss a mild-to-moderate TBI in a situation like yours where there was battle and another serious injury and transport from one treatment facility to another. There’s a military concussion evaluation, but it relies on subjective recall, which means if there weren’t people around to corroborate your memories of the events, we don’t know exactly what happened. And it’s affected by fatigue, which ninety percent of soldiers are suffering from ninety percent of the time, and has a low sensitivity when it’s administered more than twelve hours after the incident. Because of the situation you described—collapsed lung, airlift, surgery, longer-than-expected unconsciousness—it almost certainly was. And the Glasgow Coma Scale—same kind of thing. It’s a subjective assessment. If data about the length and cause of unconsciousness is faulty, you’re going to get equally faulty conclusions.”
    “But how did I make it all the way back home without someone picking up on the fact?”
    That was the part that really got to Hunter. Not just that he’d lost a year, but that he’d lost it so completely that he