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I’d glimpsed my mother’s face for a split second, but now I couldn’t remember it—just the outline of her, the sense of dark hair that fell in long, loose waves. Hair like mine.
My eyes were suddenly wet and blurry. I wiped tears away, feeling like I wiped dust into my eyes at the same time. Why did the guys have this stuff? Had they kept it for me in case I recovered my memories?
Why the hell hadn’t they told me?
It was one thing to wait for my memories to come back on my own instead of telling me…
But these objects helped reawaken my memories.
I pulled out the tie-dye hoodie. It saidOcean Cityacross the front, and it was too small to fit me now.
We’d walked along the boardwalk, seagulls following us while we ate the best French fries in Maryland. There were rows of little shops, and I’d pointed at the hoodies, knowing how much my mother loved tie-dye.
Tears welled up in my eyes as I opened a photo album to a random page. I beamed out of the photos in this book, missing my two front teeth. My mother looked at me like she adored me.
Then I turned a page, and now there was a man in the photos too, and my mother kept looking at him. Not me. Not anymore. My stomach curdled.
Something had gone very wrong in my childhood. But it hadn’t all been bad.
It was worth remembering.
I flipped back in the album and traced my fingers over the photo where my mother held me in her arms, grinning down at me. We were sitting on the porch steps in front of a farmhouse. Eagerly, I flipped back through the photos, hoping I would see more of it.
If objects triggered my memories…maybe the house where I’d grown up would too.
Maybe this was my grandparent’s house, or a house where my father still lived. Maybe there was someone out there who knew me.
In one photo, I spotted the house number: 536. I mouthed the numbers over and over to myself, afraid to lose them. Maybe, just maybe, I could go there and unlock more memories.
Raised voices were muffled, given how expansive the penthouse was, but I still heard them.
I even heard Jack curse at the other two, telling them to quiet down before they woke me.
But I wasn’t asleep at all. I put the top back on the tote hurriedly and opened the door to the room so I could hear better.
"Greyson claims he’s going to shoot the doorman if we don’t let him up,” Carter said.
“Hmm,” Sebastian said. “Is it the one we like, or the one who talks so much about the weather—”
“It’s not a joke!” Carter said. “We have to figure out what we’re going to do. If we’re going to let him see Kennedy—”
I mouthed the words to myself in disbelief. Were they going toletme see Greyson?
I loved these men, but they were morons.
“We could use Greyson’s help dealing with this,” Jack said.
“No,” Carter disagreed. “He would have something to hold over us for the rest of our lives—”
“He’s going towantKennedy for the rest of our lives!”
"Jack, he's not here to help," Sebastian interjected, his tone uncharacteristically sharp. "He's dangerous, and you know it."
“I don’t want to risk losing her either,” Carter said. “But if Greyson can help us protect her—"
"We're not letting Greyson anywhere near her,” Sebastian disagreed. “He’s the reason she was almost killed in the first place.”
“Do we know that?” Jack demanded. “We still don’t know who was trying to take her… then or now. We need him.”
