“Murdered.”

A breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding left her in a whoosh. “Yes.” Of course. Everyone in town must be acquainted with the happening. “And I lost my memory.”

He braked at a stoplight, and their gazes held. A sensation that he was trying to see beyond the surface, that those intense green eyes were searching for Paige Avery, spread through her entire being. With his scrutiny came an unexpected feeling of discovery … as though for the first time in her life, another human being could see her.

“What do the doctors say?”

His question was feathery, undemanding, but it made her twine her fingers into a knot on her lap. Because she’d asked herself a similar question every morning and night, but hers started with “why.”

Why can’t I remember?

“I’m sick of doctors,” she confessed, rubbing her thumbs together. “And cops. Not … not you, of course. I’m just sick of their questions. And feeling so frustrated. Sometimes it was as though the entire case depended on me. The harder I tried to remember the more physically ill I became. Mother had to take me away. A second chance, she said. Start over.” But how could she?

She was an emotional cripple, damaged and deeply affected by events she couldn’t even remember. On more than one noisy, rainy Seattle night, she had awakened in hysterics to shake her mother awake. I have to go back, I have to go back … Mom, we have to go back!

Paige, calm down! Calm down, you’re dreaming.

But she’d been wide awake and struggling to grasp the barest hint of a memory teasing at the fringes of her mind. Her mother couldn’t understand her ramblings. Paige could never give her a reason to return. She only knew that there was this big hole inside her. That she felt lost. That at night she felt anxious to visit the same place she didn’t want to face, either: her past. She craved to know everything her mind had forgotten.

A faint streak of sunlight lingered on the horizon, casting an orange hue across the evening skies. Poignant somehow. She had never expected Phoenix to suddenly feel … welcoming.

Zach parked at an abandoned parking lot spread out before an old, one-story building. A weathered sign that read DIXIE’S leaned against the dusty windows. The land surrounding the building seemed to have once been a miniature golf course. Despite the puddles of sooty soil scattered here and there, it still boasted a few hills covered with synthetic grass, and a wall of jutting rocks decorated its perimeter.

“Ohmigod, I know this place,” she gasped.

Out of the car more quickly than he in her excitement, she rushed toward the side entrance, one that seemed somehow separated from the rest of the building. She ran her fingers up the weathered dark wood of the small door, then one long suntanned arm reached out to unlock and push it open for her.

An apartment. It was small, but cozy and inviting. The essentials—sofa, TV, coffee table littered with magazines—sparsely furnished the area, and the air smelled clean and potently masculine.