Do You Still Love Me When We Meet Again? (Aubrey and Damon) novel Chapter 180

Chapter 180

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This time, because Damon wasn’t by her side, Aubrey spiraled. She was trapped, sinking fast into the depths of a terrifying hallucination.

She saw herself as a child–at the age when she needed her mother most, she was met with nothing but verbal abuse, violence, and threats, before being abandoned entirely. Then came the years when she loved Damon Blackwood more than life itself, yet she had been forced to give him up, losing him over and over again. And now, at the time when she was ready to pour all her love into her child, she had lost them, too.

Every person she had ever truly loved… none of them belonged to her.

She was trapped in a cycle of torture, caught in a loop of auditory and visual hallucinations that refused to let her go.

She had fallen into a terrifying abyss, a dark place where she was forced to relive her greatest agonies on a repeat cycle.

The heart–shredding pain was more than she could bear, making life itself a burden too heavy to carry. In a daze of despair, she had sought the ultima elease, submerging herself in a bathtub full of water until she was completely lost to the depths.

There had been no warning, no long–drawn–out decision–only the desperate, singular need to escape the suffering.

ust as she stood at the threshold of the void, a sharp, searing pain exploded in her chest. In an instant, her consciousness was slammed back into realit Her chest throbbed with the force of repeated, heavy compressions. Water spilled from her mouth as her heavy eyelids flickered. Through the hazy limmer of her vision, she saw Tracy leaning over her, frantically breathing air into her lungs.

racy forced breath after breath into her lungs, then resumed the desperate rhythm of the chest compressions.

Her mind was a fog; her breathing was shallow and weak. From somewhere far off, the wailing siren of an ambulance began to pierce the silence.

he didn’t know how much time had passed, but suddenly, the air was thick with the sound of voices–loud, chaotic, and overwhelming.

racy’s voice was the clearest thing in the room, sharp enough to cut through the haze. She sounded like she was on the phone with Damon.

Damon, it’s your wife. Something’s happened. It’s bad.”

The moment those words hit her, her consciousness shattered again, dragging her back into the dark.

When she finally opened her eyes again, the sterile white of the hospital ceiling burned. Her gaze was vacant, drifting slowly over the blur of faces

rowded around her bed.

The Blackwoods. They were all there.

hen, a familiar figure came into focus, and a wave of pure, visceral nausea hit her.

Her brother, Brendan Hayes.

What the hell was he doing here? Was he checking to see if she was finally dead? Was he waiting to scatter her ashes into the ocean and be done with

er?

Or maybe he was just waiting for her to die under the Blackwoods‘ roof so he could shake them down for a massive settlement.

God, that was it. He was here for the payout.

he couldn’t die at the Blackwoods‘ estate. If she was going to end it, she had to do it somewhere far away from them–somewhere he couldn’t profu rom her corpse.

Clarity was a fleeting ghost. She slipped back into that ethereal, agonizing void, trapped in a thick fog that swallowed her whole no matter how hard he fought to stay afloat.

She drifted in and out, sinking and surfacing in a sea of nothingness. She had no concept of time any more. Was it day? Night? She couldn’t tell

Most of the time, her brain felt like lead–heavy, frozen, and hopelessly blurred.

Juring one of her brief moments of lucidity, she felt herself being wheeled into a cold room. Doctors were attaching electrodes to her head and sliding i needle into her arm, flooding her veins with an anesthetic,

Three seconds. That was all it took for the world to go black.

When she drifted back to consciousness, she was being wheeled out of the room. A man was there, holding a cup of water to her parched lips and gently wiping her hands with a damp cloth.

She stared at him, her gaze vacant and hollow. For a terrifying moment, she couldn’t even remember who he was.

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< Chapter 180

She floated in that hazy, disconnected limbo for nearly two hours before the fog finally lifted. Oh… right. He was Damon Blackwood. The man s

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loved more than life itself.

And then, naturally, came the memory of her brother, Brendan Hayes.

Damon remained by her side, attentive and constant, while Brendan sat slumped on the hospital sofa, completely absorbed in a game on his phon Her mind felt heavy, bogged down by a crushing weight that made even the simplest thought feel impossible to grasp.

Damon told her what had happened–that she’d had a breakdown and nearly drowned in the tub. Tracy had been the one to find her, the one whe her life. Now, her brother was here for the sole purpose of signing the consent forms for her treatment.

The ECT–electroconvulsive therapy–wasn’t a one–and–done deal. It required multiple sessions, usually three times a week. The doctors were s valuating her condition, trying to determine exactly how many rounds it would take to see any real effect.

he used to be terrified of the procedure. The thought of losing her memories–of forgetting Damon or anyone else who had ever cared for her- ightmare she couldn’t face.

But now, a soul–deep numbness had taken over. She was too exhausted, too broken to fight back anymore.

Maybe Damon would rather see her mind fried to a pulp than lose her to the darkness of her own depression.

hat was the price of the treatment. Every time she woke up, she had to spend an agonizing amount of time just trying to piece together who the tanding around her bed were.

The more sessions she endured, the more her memories faded into a vast, white void. With every treatment, the time it took to recall a single face tretched longer and longer.

ventually, the “why” behind it all vanished. She would wake up in a total haze, unable to recognize the people standing by her bed or remember t equence of events that had landed her in a psychiatric ward in the first place.

Autumn had settled over New Haven City, bringing an exceptionally sharp, relentless chill.

Aubrey Hayes had been confined to the psychiatric wing for two months. After her final procedure, she sat in a catatonic state for what felt like ho truggling to claw her way back through the mental fog.

he couldn’t even recall the doctors and nurses she had seen right before the surgery; the people around her were nothing more than ghosts–comp

trangers.

、 man–strikingly handsome, with a presence that felt both heavy and familiar–held her hand.“I have to head out to the base for two weeks starting ɔmorrow,” he told her.“It’s the rocket testing phase, so I can’t spare a second, and I can’t take any leave. When you’re ready to be discharged, I’ve Iready told Tracy to come and get you.”

Aubrey could only stare at him, captivated by the sharp, perfect lines of his face. She completely forgot to ask the questions burning in the back of h

ind:

Who was he?

And who was Tracy?

is he prepared to leave, he leaned down and pressed a lingering kiss to her forehead. Aubrey froze, caught entirely off guard. The contact sent a jolt hrough her, making her heart hammer against her ribs and a sudden, inexplicable heat flush her cheeks. She felt a strange, overwhelming sense of hyness.

Who… who exactly was this guy?

He knew perfectly well she’d been undergoing ECT for two months. He knew her brain was a jumbled mess, yet he hadn’t bothered to introduce himself–and then he had the nerve to just kiss her like that?

Seriously, the nerve of some people.

Later-

When Aubrey finally got her hands on her discharge papers, the diagnosis hit her like a physical blow: major depressive disorder and bipolar. Below that, she saw the treatment log–twenty–five rounds of ECT in just two months.

She couldn’t help the low whistle that escaped her lips.“Holy shit,” she breathed.

No wonder her brain felt like it was moving through molasses. She’d been grappling with a mental breakdown this severe, and they’d literally zapped her brain twenty–five times? At that frequency, she was lucky she hadn’t been fried to a crisp.

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