I remembered how to make coffee.
I knew the sequence for isolating a damaged electrical panel.
I remembered being nineteen, twenty-one, twenty-six.
I remembered Leah calling from Idaho to tell me Emma had been born. I remembered the apartment in Denver with the radiator that hissed all winter and the neighbor who practiced trumpet after midnight. I remembered telling a man I loved him and hearing him laugh as though I had performed a joke for his benefit.
Then the road of my life stopped.
Six years did not blur.
They vanished.
One moment, I was alone in Denver, furious at myself for trusting the wrong people and convinced I would never make that mistake again.
The next, I was waking beneath hospital lights with metal inside my body and a beautiful stranger holding my hand as though letting go would kill us both.
Except Reid was not a stranger.
Everyone agreed on that.
My sister.
The doctors.
The men at the yard.
The photographs.
My messages.
Every surviving piece of evidence placed Reid Callahan at the center of my missing life.
He was my employer.
My partner.
The man whose apartment I shared.
The man I discussed groceries with and argued with and slept beside. The man I kissed, touched, desired, trusted.
The man I had apparently planned to marry.
There was a ring locked in a safe downstairs.
A ring selected for me by a man who loved me.
That should have felt romantic.
Instead, it felt like discovering a sealed letter addressed to someone who happened to have my name.
I saw the way Reid looked at me.
That was one of the first things I learned after waking.
His control was nearly perfect when he knew I was watching. His face became calm, his voice level, his hands deliberate.
When he thought my attention had drifted, the grief appeared.
