Her brain stuck on a vision of her mother, turning in a repeating loop, with a white plate heaped with food in her hand. She held it out to Linda, whose hands were thin and pale but tipped with demure pink, as she accepted it. Nausea rolled up as Linda dropped the rest of her food into the nearby bin, then bent over it with a shudder. She gasped for breath, staring at her strong, broad adult hands clenching her thighs. Don’t go there, she warned herself. Don’t live it again.

“You can’t run forever,” Dr. Kirkland had told her. “Memory isn’t something you leave behind. Eventually, when you can handle it, you’ll remember what hurt you.”

Scalpels hurt. Needles hurt. Electrolysis hurt. Throwing up hurt. She remembered it all. So why couldn’t she handle it? Why was she still running away when there were such things as magic and love? She’d not touched on that memory in months, years even. It wasn’t relevant. It revealed nothing. She already knew what had happened back then. This memory was not new, not a guarded secret and it did not have the power to make her fourteen again. Not after all this time. She wouldn’t allow it.

She made herself walk, willing the motion to settle her stomach. She came to the end of the market and knew she had to turn back. But where was she going? Marissa was in California. Her mother was in Massachusetts. The ticket in her wallet said Auckland, but she didn’t have to go there. She could go anywhere in the world she wanted.

She wanted to run to Marissa, for the first time wanting to run toward something instead of away.

She wasn’t the woman Marissa thought she was, though she wanted to be. What would Marissa think of her when she learned the truth? Marissa had wanted a lie, a mask. Except she hadn’t, not last night. Last night, she had wanted the real Linda. Hadn’t she?

She bought a bit of the cool blue silk to remind her of Marissa’s eyes. Tucking it in her shirt pocket she felt as if she’d found something that would help her remember the way she’d felt last night: safe. It didn’t make sense, but then again the way Marissa had seemed to see all the way inside her, well, that didn’t make sense either.

Linda caught herself searching out the window of the Air New Zealand plane for the tenth time since take off. Marissa’s plane was long gone and now they were heading in opposite directions. The bond between them was a fragile tether, she told herself, and distance would snap it. The fruitless yearning for impossible things would end.

“You don’t live the life other girls do,” she could hear her mother say. Yeah, Mom, she thought viciously, you made damn sure of that.

Turning her gaze inside the cabin she caught a glimpse of the blue silk tucked in her pocket. Part of her wanted to stuff it down the seatback pocket and the other to braid it into a bracelet that she never removed. Was last night a lie or truth? What had she seen in Marissa’s eyes that she could trust?