“It’s only been a little over twenty-four hours, and you’ve already retrieved a few bits of memory. I have great hopes for tomorrow.” For a man with great hopes, he sounded remarkably composed.

She was making inroads into her dinner. “Who would have suspected the food in such a small town would be so good?”

“Gothic caters to the tourists, and good food brings them in.”

“Was that the reason you moved here?”

“One of them.”

“Food is really important to me.”

“I can see that.”

She considered pinning him with a withering glare. But the sticky pork mellowed her. “What are the other ones? Reasons you moved here?”

That seemed to give him pause. “I have room to work without disturbing anyone. The house and land were, for California, reasonable. But those aren’t the real reasons.”

She put down her fork and leaned her chin on her cupped hand.

He put his fork down, too. “I didn’t mean to stop here. I was driving away from California. I meant to go north, to Oregon or Washington or even Canada. I was taking the back roads, taking my time, shaking off the...” He took a long breath. “Shaking off the grief.”

She wanted to ask, What grief? but didn’t dare interrupt.

“When I got to Gothic, I drove down those curves. I saw the For Sale sign here. I stopped and got out of my car, and for the first time in a year, I could breathe.” He picked up his fork. “So I bought it.”

She waited a few seconds to see if he would continue. When he didn’t, she picked up her fork, too. “A good investment! It is lovely here, perched on the sharp edge of the continent. Are you sleeping with me tonight?”

He didn’t look as if the prospect made him want to jump for joy, but he said, “If you want me to.”

“Yes, please.” The fearful knot inside her gut loosened a little, and she could breathe, too. “This evening, what do you want to do? After we eat?” She meant, did he want to sit together and talk, maybe kiss, figure out whether her survival and his rescue of her meant she was his lost soul?

Instead he said, “I’m not much for TV.”

“Uh, no.” He hadn’t followed her train of thought at all. “Who is?”

“If I want to watch, and mostly I don’t, I stream something on the computer.”

He thought she might complain about the size of the monitor, but no—she zeroed in on the interesting part of his explanation. “Why don’t you watch TV?”

“Nothing I want to see.”

“You don’t seem like a twenty-four-hour-news guy.”

“No. The world runs without me, and there’s nothing I can do to change the course of history short of—” He stopped so fast his voice got scratchy.

“Short of what?”

“Assassination.” Probably not the best answer.