Because you don’t want to. You know from some psychology class you took that the mind protects itself, that sometimes areas of your life are too painful to remember, so the mind closes the door to whatever it was that was so brutal.

Face it, you can’t remember.

Not now, anyway.

Glancing at his scruffy reflection in the mirror, he considered his lack of memory and decided it might just be for the best.

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 13

If James Cahill thought he was going to get off the hook that easy, he had another think coming, Charity decided as she drove to her apartment, a studio cut into what had once been the maid’s quarters in a larger home. She pulled into the driveway and eyed the place.

It appeared right smack out of a damned Currier and Ives lithograph: a three-storied Victorian with snow on the roof and even icicles hanging from the eaves. Years before, the grand old home had been sliced into five apartments, including the owner’s living quarters on the main floor. Another unit was housed in the basement; two more were on the second floor; and finally the smallest, Charity’s studio, was tucked into the third floor.

She knew her neighbors by sight and by their names on the mailboxes, but that was about it. The guy in the basement kept to himself—some kind of computer nerd, she thought and wondered if he was really into porn or something nefarious; she told herself that she had to check that out. The people on the second floor were a couple, and the wife was pregnant. Oh, goody. Soon there would be a screaming baby. Charity could hardly wait. The only semi-normal person in the whole place was a woman of about forty or so in the apartment below hers, neighbor to the pregnant couple on the second floor. And that woman—Maribelle Edwards—just happened to work at Cahill Industries as a cook, which, Charity decided, was a stroke of luck. She reminded herself to cozy up to Maribelle, take over a bottle of wine and loosen her lips about what went on behind the closed doors of the hotel.

She hurried into the foyer and took the stairs to her apartment. It was messy, with a couple of pairs of jeans left on the floor, a comforter sliding off the couch, and an array of glasses left on tables—but compared to the mess she’d caught a glimpse of at James Cahill’s place, her home looked shipshape.

Kinda.

As she locked the door behind her, she kicked off her boots, then shrugged out of her coat and adjusted the heat on the thermostat, which had two settings: colder than Antarctica in winter and hotter than hell. She opted for the latter.