Her gaze fixed with his, and Julian knew it was already too late.
Conductive hearing loss as a result of ossicular chain discontinuity due to head trauma.
Tessa glanced at the words printed on the bright orange sticker on the tab of the file folder in the nurse’s hands.
Her diagnosis.
It had taken her doctors—four of them in all, led by Dr. Meryl Spencer, an auditory specialist at Mount Sinai—ten days and a total of three different hearing tests to settle on one. It was really just a fancy way of saying what everyone suspected. When she’d fallen and hit her head, she’d sustained damage to the delicate bones in her middle ear. They were no longer connected properly, which prevented sound from being conducted to her brain. It was impossible to tell the extent of the damage, or whether or not her hearing loss was permanent, until her body healed.
In the words of Dr. Spencer, it was “a waiting game.”
So Tessa waited.
And waited.
All in all, she’d been waiting for thirteen months. Thirteen months of adjusting to a life of silence—a life without the sound of laughter or the voices of the people she loved or the Manhattan street noises that Tessa hadn’t realized were so ingrained in her consciousness until she no longer heard them. A life without music.
But she’d adjusted. She’d done it. Through it all, she’d never lost the one thing she loved most of all. She’d never lost dance.
Tessa wasn’t waiting anymore. She hadn’t been waiting for a while now. She was getting on with things. So thirteen months was probably an exaggeration. She wasn’t sure when she’d given up the notion that she’d ever hear again, but she most definitely had. What kind of person would hold out hope after all this time?
“The doctor will be with you in just a moment.” The nurse offered Tessa a soothing smile and slid the file folder into a plastic chart holder on the door to the exam room.
“Thank you.” Tessa nodded.
Once the nurse was gone, Mr. B, who’d accompanied Tessa to the after-hours appointment, relaxed and settled into a comfortable ball. Seconds later, when Dr. Spencer opened the door, the little dog popped back up.
“Hello, Tessa. And hello to you, too, Mr. B. It’s good to see you both,” the doctor said.
“You, too.” Tessa exhaled a calming breath. Everything’s going to be fine. There’s a simple explanation for all of this.
Right. Because traumatic head injuries were so often classified as simple.
That was never the case. Literally never. Not even a year after the fact.
“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.” Tessa shifted, and the paper on the exam table made a terrible, crunching sound. She winced.
Dr. Spencer’s brow furrowed, and she pulled an otoscope from the pocket of her white coat. “Your email said you’d been experiencing some auditory symptoms. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on, and I’ll take a look inside your ears?”
Auditory symptoms. What an innocuous way to describe the chaos in her head. “I can hear all of a sudden, but it’s not right. The noises are distorted. Too loud. Too...” Too much. Much too much.
The doctor asked her more questions and examined her ears using the otoscope. When she was finished, she slipped the instrument back inside her pocket and smiled. Tessa hadn’t seen Dr. Spencer smile much before, if ever. Her bedside manner was usually polite, efficient and a little on the brusque side. Then again, maybe there’d just never been anything about Tessa’s case to smile about. Until now.
“It seems as though there’s been a change in the connectivity between the bones of your right middle ear. That’s the most likely possibility. It’s good news, Tessa. Potentially very good news.”
Tessa swallowed and glanced down at Mr. B, who was wagging his tail. Good news. It didn’t feel so good. “But what does it mean, exactly?”
Dr. Spencer nodded, and her smile grew even wider. “It means that the hearing in your right ear is potentially on the road to being restored.”
Her right ear only. That explained why she’d felt so lopsided and out of balance. And why she’d fallen out of a piqué turn during her audition.
“You don’t seem nearly as happy about this development as I’d expected. This is what we’ve been waiting for, Tessa. To be honest with you, I’d nearly given up on any kind of natural healing of the connectivity in your middle ear. It’s been a year.”
As if Tessa didn’t know the exact date she’d fallen. September 14. She’d never forget.
“It’s just nothing like I expected.” A siren wailed somewhere outside the building—an ambulance most likely. A migraine began to blossom behind Tessa’s right eye. “Everything is so loud. Distorted. Something must be wrong.”
She blinked back tears. Mr. B pawed at her foot and gazed up at her, his soft brown eyes wide with worry.
Dr. Spencer scooped the dog into her arms and placed her in Tessa’s lap. “I understand your concern, and I promise what you’re experiencing is completely normal. Remember how difficult it was to adjust to your hearing loss? It took time and patience. You need to be gentle with yourself now, just as you were before. Hearing has a profound effect on a person’s perspective on life. It’s time to alter your perspective again.”
Alter her perspective. She could do that. She’d done it before, hadn’t she? “How so, exactly?”
“The only surefire answer is time. I’m going to give you the same advice I give patients right after they receive cochlear implants. Reduce your amount of external stimuli as much as possible. Take things slow. Stay home so you can get used to the common sounds of everyday life. Eventually, the sound won’t be so disorienting for you.”
“Stay home,” Tessa echoed.
At least she’d already told her mother she couldn’t teach tap tonight. If she went straight home after this appointment, she’d have a solid eleven or twelve hours before she had to leave for the final day of auditions in the morning.
She nodded. “Fine. How long are we talking about, exactly?”
Dr. Spencer shrugged. “It varies. It’s different for everyone. Once you’ve gotten reacquainted with the surroundings in your own little world, you can start to venture out of your house. Sometimes it takes months. Most of the time, only a matter of weeks. You used to hear, so the process should go more smoothly for you. I’d say take two to three weeks to yourself before you venture out again.”
Two to three weeks? Impossible. “But I can’t do that. I’m auditioning for the Manhattan Ballet. I have to be in the studio tomorrow.”
Dr. Spencer’s smile vanished altogether. “Now probably isn’t the best time to tackle something new, Tessa.”
“I can’t drop out midaudition. I might never get this chance again.” She shook her head. No. Just no. She couldn’t lose another year of her life. She wouldn’t. “Maybe it’s not as serious as you think it is. Could this be temporary? Remember the tinnitus I had just a few weeks after the accident? It went away. This could, too, right?”
She was grasping at straws. What’s more, she wasn’t making sense. What head injury patient with conductive hearing loss complained about her hearing potentially coming back?
Judging from the bewildered look on Dr. Spencer’s face, none of them did. Only Tessa. “The tinnitus was indeed temporary, thank goodness. Some patients go their entire lives with ringing in their ears. I was relieved beyond measure when it became clear you wouldn’t