Their Christmas Miracle. Barbara Wallace
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Of her.
If it wasn’t her, it was her perfectly identical twin.
“There are more.” He swiped to another photo, this time a more sophisticated version of the same woman, with her hair in a twist and wearing a stunning black gown.
“The museum fund-raiser last May,” he said. “You looked beautiful in that dress.”
What she looked was unhappy. Her smile didn’t reach her eyes.
The next picture must have been taken the same evening, only this time her doppelganger was flanked by a woman with flaming red hair and a handsome older man with shaggy graying hair and spectacles.
“Those are your colleagues from the university. Eve Cunningham and Professor Richard Sinclair.”
She couldn’t help noticing the firm way the professor held his arm around her waist.
“You’re not in these photos.” She rubbed her forehead. A throbbing sensation started behind her eye.
“That’s because I took them.”
And they were on his phone. “Is there one of us together?” Anyone could get random photos from any number of sources. It would be harder, although not impossible, to fake a photo of both of them.
“A few.” Seconds later, she was looking at a selfie—and a terrible one at that, with looming faces and the tops of the heads cropped off. No mistaking her face though, right down to the annoying scar across the bridge of her nose.
Unlike the other photographs, their smiles reflected in their eyes.
“We took this two springs ago, when we were in the Lake District,” Thomas told her.
“Two springs ago? Nothing more recent?”
“I’m not much of a selfie taker.”
That was obvious. She studied the photograph closer. “We look happy.”
We. She was starting to believe him. Rosalind Collier. The name sounded strange, but had a comfortable feeling. The way a new outfit felt when it fit properly.
Thomas took back the phone and stared at the photo. “We were,” he said. “Happy. You loved being at our place in Cumbria, away from the city.”
Then why did his voice suddenly sound sad? Why was he staring at the picture with a pensive expression?
“You were supposed to be in Cumbria when you had your accident,” he murmured.
Oh. That was why. A wisp of a thought taunted her, hovering just out of her grasp. Something about ice or rocks, but it slipped back into the blackness before she could be certain.
She was certain of another thought however. “If I was supposed to be in the Lake District, how did I end up here, miles away? Fort William is miles away from Cumbria too. What was I doing there? It doesn’t make sense.”
“No one knows.” He tossed the camera onto the table where it landed with a thunk. “Best theory I can come up with is that you were headed toward Loch Morar. You did some field work there once. You’re a geologist,” he added when she frowned.
“Geomorphological features.” The words popped out of her mouth without her thinking. Thomas’s eyes widened in response.
“Exactly,” he said. “You did a paper on the glacier marks.”
She slipped a step closer to accepting his tale. As it was, the name Rosalind was already taking hold in her brain.
“What we don’t understand,” he said, “is how you got here. We searched for weeks and everyone was certain you’d been washed into the Atlantic. How did you end up here in the northeast corner?”
It would be nice if she could give him an answer. Who was she kidding? She wished she could give herself an answer. “I haven’t a clue. First thing I remember is walking along the motorway and being very, very tired. I didn’t have a clue who I was or what I was doing.”
“You don’t remember crossing an entire country?”
What she remembered was being terrified as she had stood on the hard shoulder shivering in the early morning dew. “I don’t even remember waking up that morning,” she told him. “A truck horn blared at me, and suddenly I was there.” Staring at the trees in a daze. “I was filthy. Disgustingly so.” Having heard she may have plunged into a river helped explain why her clothes had looked like they’d been rolled in a wet ball. “My clothes were torn, and I didn’t have any identification.”
“Dear God,” Thomas whispered. His chair scraped along the floor as he scooted closer. She could feel his eyes on her, waiting for what she would say next.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do. Fortunately, Chris happened to drive by and recognized I needed help. He took me to the hospital, who in turn sent me to another hospital in Wick where they came up with the traumatic amnesia diagnosis.”
Ironic how those memories were crystal clear. From the moment she’d found herself on that road till now, everything that had happened was indelibly imprinted on her brain.
“I don’t understand.” Thomas looked more confused than ever, and she suspected she knew why. “If you were at the hospital, why didn’t they...”
“Look into the missing persons reports?”
“Surely you knew people were looking for you. Surely your friend, Chris, knew?”
“We did.”
“Then...why?”
She paused. When he heard the answer, he wasn’t going to be happy.
“I asked them not to.”
His eyes doubled in size. “What?”
“I didn’t want to be located. Not straight away, anyway.”
“For crying out—” His fist pounded the table with a bang so loud it could be heard on the other side of the room. The noise brought Chris to the end of the bar.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“It’s okay,” she replied. Collier’s reaction could have been worse. Having flung himself back in his seat, he was washing his hands up and down his face. When he finally lowered them, there was no hiding the angry confusion darkening his eyes.
“Why the hell not?” He spoke through a clenched jaw, clearly trying to hold his temper.
“Because I needed time. To figure out what was going on. To see if my memory came back on its own.”
“I see.” It was hard to decide which was more restrained, his body or his voice. Both were being held tight. “And it never occurred to you that there might be other people whose lives were affected? Who were mourning you?”
“Of course it occurred to me,” she snapped. Though maybe not as much as it should have, she thought guiltily. “But put yourself in my shoes. I couldn’t remember anything—not my name, not how I got hurt. Meanwhile, the doctors are telling me I suffered some kind of horrible trauma. For all I knew, the people I left behind were the cause of that trauma.”
Thomas hissed as though slapped. “I would never...”
“I—” Know, she almost said. Even though instinct said the thought was on target, she held back. “I didn’t remember you.”
“You could have looked. Your disappearance was all over the news, the internet.”
“Have you seen where we are? We’re in the middle of nowhere. It’s not as if we’re in a breaking news zone. I looked for missing persons in Scotland and nothing came up. Which only made me more convinced I might be running away.
“Anyway, I asked Chris and Jessica if it would be okay