The truth is I’ve tried before and failed.

“I feel like a loser,” I say. “I’ll make an appointment for next week. I’ll see my doctor first, see what he recommends for treatment and what it will involve.”

“Honey,” she says. “I have faith in you. I really do. Connor Moss is absolutely not a loser.”

“I feel like one sometimes,” I say.

She takes me in with those beautiful blues. “You’re going to have to fix that on your own too.”

Kristen starts to leave and then suddenly turns around and gives me a sweet but knowing look. She’s an angel. She really is. No other woman would have put up with me.

“You need a shower,” she says. “You smell like a distillery.”

I manage a smile in return. “Never again, Kristen.” I don’t add the word promise into the conversation. That’s a concept that I’ve overplayed in the past. More than a few times.

I hoist myself up from the bed and make my way to the bathroom. It’s a small space tiled from floor to ceiling in a mosaic of beach glass. The window is open, and I can hear the sounds of the highway above the beach. A siren passes by. I assume it’s additional police, driving down the hill to the little row of cabins.

Missing. Abducted. Taken. The words play in my head as I turn on the shower and wait for the water to warm. It seems unreal. TV-like. Investigation Discovery. I catch my reflection in the mirror. I’m tall, in good shape. My hair’s holding up better than my dad’s ever did, and I’m grateful for that. I look a little green around the eyes at the moment, but I’ll drink lots of water and get past this hangover. My right shoulder is a web of scars from a car accident years ago. For a waiter, I’m not too bad. For a man married to a high-powered woman, I’m not the catch that I could have been.

Or once was.

The sight of my scars and the noise of the running water and the sirens triggers a memory. It’s one that I keep buried. Not because I truly want to forget it—forgetting it would be a mistake—but because that moment changed my life forever. And not in a good way. Hot water cascades over me, and I lather up, running my soapy hands over my sore body and feeling the slightly raised skin of my shoulder. I pick at a knife cut on my hand, and red swirls down into the chrome-plated drain.

That reminds me too.

It was long before Kristen. I was twenty-four and visiting cousins in Huntington Beach. The rich cousins. I’d completed my degree in sociology at USC and was doing what I’d been doing far too much for far too long. My cousin Rob and I’d spent the day at the beach drinking beer from a red plastic Coleman cooler. We were wasted. Really wasted. I remember we ran out of beer, and Rob actually went around the beach with a wad of cash, buying more from whoever had any. Rob was persuasive. He was the kind of guy who had a big white smile and a sleepy casualness that made him approachable and fun to be around.