He sounded so anguished, she couldn’t bear it. She turned and looked up at him, taking his chin with her hand. “Hey, hey, it’s all right, Damien. I understand. This is what we agreed on, and this is the right thing to do. But I’m so very glad we had this time together, and the only thing I regret is that it has to end.”

If he said it didn’t have to end, Mandy seriously doubted she could say no to him at that moment. He was looking at her so intensely, as though he wanted to see inside her soul, his grip on her tightening.

But he just said, “No regrets. Just good memories, and that’s more than I expected.”

Somehow that didn’t seem like enough.

Chapter 16

Damien set his suitcase down inside the front door of his apartment and let the quiet settle over him. No ocean. No Caribbean music. No Mandy.

He lived on the twenty-seventh floor to avoid some of the usual noises of the city, so the only things he could hear were the hum of his refrigerator and taxi horns honking down below on Eighty-fifth Street.

He wanted to throw something. He wanted to lift his suitcase and toss it right out the window of his living room.

Everything had been fine. He had been living his life, in a narrow, stilted kind of way, that was true, but he had been coping. He hadn’t felt anything.

Now he wanted what he couldn’t have.

Damien picked up the cordless phone by his kitchen table and hit the “on” button. No voice mail messages waited for him. He had been gone five days and he didn’t have a single fucking phone message. This was what had happened to him. No one knew where he was, no one cared.

He had nothing.

Hurtling his keys on the counter, he dug in his pocket for his wallet. He flipped it open and pulled out the picture he kept in the back. The one of Jess leaning over his shoulder, her long hair tumbling down his chest. Her eyes were laughing at the camera as she posed, looking perfectly pretty the way she always had. The expression on his face was different than hers. He looked graspingly happy, like he was in ecstasy, and terrified it would disappear.

Well, it had, but not the way he’d always expected. In the back of his head, he had always assumed Jessica would leave him someday. He couldn’t keep her happy, and they had always swung from blissful calm to outbursts of discontent—weeks where she would mope around and he would do everything short of kissing her ass to get her to smile again. But never had he expected that night when Jess had gotten angry with him and run off with her friends, as she did on a regular basis, that she would wind up dead.