“You have a tattoo.”
“I do.”
“When did you get it?”
“Last December. I’d been thinking about it for a while, but you talked me into it.”
I grin as I skim my fingers over it.
He releases a deep groan. “Hanna, you touch me like that and we won’t make it out of here tonight.”
I wrap my arms around his neck and rise onto my toes to kiss him. “Max Hallowell, I don’t know how I landed a guy like you, but I promise I’m going to be the best wife you could ask for. I’m going to earn this.”
Something flashes across his face—sadness, regret?—and he strokes his thumb down my cheek before gathering me against his chest and drawing in a deep breath against my hair.
“I’m the one who needs to earn this. Don’t be fooled.”
November—Nine Months Before Accident
The morning light reflecting off the river is quickly becoming one of my favorite sights. Even when the ground is covered with a thin sheet of snow and the air is cold enough that I can see my breath, I’m learning to like this time. I can’t exactly say I love running, but I appreciate it, and I’m surprised how quickly I’m gaining stamina.
Max climbs out of his car, looking downright edible in his black, long-sleeved, moisture-wicking shirt and shorts. “Good morning!”
“It’s a beautiful one,” I call back. His smile warms me more than a cloudless spring day. I’ve become spoiled by this time with him, his attention on me.
We start jogging without preamble. At first I feel really good, but within less than fifteen minutes, my head gets fuzzy and my vision starts to blur.
My feet scuff the ground as I stumble mid-stride. Max grabs my arm and catches me before I can fall.
“Whoa, careful,” he murmurs. “Easy there. Are you okay?”
The world spins off-kilter before righting itself, and I point to the ground. “I think I just need to sit down for a minute.” I sink to the cold grass, the frozen earth solid and reassuring under me, and try to blink away a sudden wave of nausea.
“Hanna.” Max squats before me and cups my face in his hand. Worry creases his brow. “Did you eat this morning?”
I blink. He’s touching me, and I don’t want to talk about my diet. I want to melt into his warmth. “I don’t like to eat before I run,” I admit.
“Okay, my lecture on that aside. What about last night?”
“Chicken breast,” I answer, mentally amending half a chicken breast.
“What else?”
“What do you mean?”
“What did you eat with it?” His thumb strokes my cheek.
“Oh. I had it on about two cups of mixed greens.”
“Any starch? Grains? Fruit?”
“No.”
He takes a seat next to me and rests his forearms on his knees. “Lunch?”
“I don’t know. I was busy. Maybe an apple.”
He bows his head. “I’m the worst trainer ever. You didn’t say anything about weight loss, and I just assumed you weren’t looking to lose weight. But I should have known.”
“Known what?”
He smiles at me. “You’re just that kind of personality. You know? You decide you’re going to do something and you go all in.”
“You make it sound like a bad thing.”
He grins. “It’s not, but you can’t starve yourself. If you really want to lose weight, that’s okay, but you have to eat to lose.”
I try not to roll my eyes at the advice I’ve heard again and again. I push myself off the ground. “I think I should just go home.”
“Hanna, just promise me you’ll start eating.”
So I can stay this size forever? “Sure.”
“Good. Then you can come with me to dinner on Friday.”
Frowning, I turn back to him. “Why?”
He stands and brushes off his shorts. “I think it’s called a date. I buy you dinner. We eat together. Maybe hold hands on the way home?”
I blink at him and the world spins in front of me again, but I soften my knees and draw in a long, slow breath. “That sounds nice.”
“Pick you up at six.”
Present Day
Liz: Nate disappeared, so no sexy rocker for me tonight. Damn. I’ve known nuns who got more action than I’ve seen lately.
I grimace at Lizzy’s text from last night. On the one hand, she makes me laugh, but on the other, I don’t know what she’s going to think when I tell her Nate is Mr. Hulk Tattoo.
I’m supposed to spend the day looking at wedding venues with my mom, and all I can think about is whether I cheated on my fiancé. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure I need to know if I’m f**king some rock star behind Max’s back before I can choose the length of my veil.
I’ve been working in the bakery since four thirty this morning, and the clock reads twenty to six when Lizzy comes through the front door, her eyes half closed.
“Why couldn’t your dream career have required me to sleep past ten every day, huh?” She pushes past me and to the coffee. “I swear, if I weren’t an unemployed loser, I’d tell you to find someone else to wake up at the ass crack of dawn.” She pours herself a cup of coffee and then dumps cream in it before taking a long drink. “Fuck me, that’s good.” When she finally opens her eyes and looks at me—really looks at me—she frowns. “What’s wrong?”
“I know who Mr. Hulk Tattoo is,” I whisper.
She straightens. “Really? Did he come back? Did you see him somewhere?”
“He was at Asher’s last night.”
She grins. “Oh, the plot thickens!”
“It’s Nate Crane, Liz.”
“What’s Nate Crane?”
“Nate Crane is the guy who got into my bed like he belonged there. He’s the guy I was cheating on Max with.”
She squeezes her eyes shut and mutters, “God, you’re such a bitch.”
“What?”
“You’re engaged. Sue me for hating you a little. You get the perfect life and the hottie on the side.”
“The hottie on the side might ruin the perfect life!” As much as I want to tell myself that my secret was safe, as much as I want to let go of what might or might not have happened with Nate, I can’t stop obsessing over what I’ve done. What if my memories don’t return? I need answers.
Liz frowns. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. But come on. Who could blame you? Nate. Fucking. Crane. You were f**king Nate Crane.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” I protest.
She cocks her head. “How familiar was he with your body when he was touching you in the dark?”
I wince. “This sucks.”
She shakes her head as if still trying to clear away sleepiness. “Okay, so you saw him at the party and realized he was the guy. Then what? Did he approach you?”
“No. The opposite. He saw me and went in the other direction. But this is my life, you know? My future with this really great guy. And the more time I spend with Max, the more sure I am that he’s the right guy for me, and I don’t want to screw this up, but maybe I already have. So I followed Nate outside and told him I have amnesia and he asked when the engagement happened—before or after the amnesia, as if that made a difference—and I told him before and he was upset all over again and wouldn’t talk to me about it. He walked away without answering any of my questions, but I got a hold of his cell phone and read through some of our texts to each other, and it looks really bad, and now I don’t know who to talk to or where to get answers, but I’m scared I’ll lose Max if I tell him and…” I take a long, gasping breath. “Help.”
“Okay.” She sets her coffee on the counter and comes over to put her hands on my shoulders. “This is going to be all right. We’re going to figure this out. Together. But first you have to breathe.”
“Right.” I draw in another shaky breath. And another. I’m on my third before Lizzy’s nodding and smiling.
“Okay. Now do you think you and Nate were just…”
“Just what?”
“Do you think he just came by for booty calls, or do you think you had a relationship?”
“He said, ‘I’m the idiot who’s in love with you.’ Those were his words, ‘the idiot who’s in love with you.’ And then the text messages…?”
“Dirty?”
I nod. “Really dirty.”
“Oh, damn, girl.”
“I know. Right?”
She rubs her hands together. “Okay. I could talk to Nate, right? Feel him out?”
“He’s hella pissed at me, Liz. I don’t think he’s any more likely to talk to you.”
“What about Asher?” she asks, but my horror must be evident on my face because she says, “Okay, okay, bad idea. No one else needs to know until they need to know, right?”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
“Your phone!” she exclaims. “We didn’t know who we were looking for yesterday! Look in your contacts first. Maybe you have his name programmed as something else.”
I scroll through my contacts until I see find his name staring back at me. “He’s here. Programmed into my phone.”
She makes a hurry-up gesture with her hand. “Well, click on the history.”
I frown. I called him last Friday. That was the day of my accident. We had a three-minute conversation. About what? Judging from his reaction when he saw my ring, I obviously wasn’t telling him about my engagement.
“Oh, hell, Liz. This doesn’t make any sense.”
She snatches the phone from my hand and starts scrolling through the history under Nate’s contact info. “But you said there were texts from you on his phone?”
“Yeah. A lot of them. I didn’t get very far back before he found me and took it back.”
“But there’s nothing on your phone, which seems to indicate you deleted the evidence.”
I cross my arms. “It looks like it.”
“Where’s your laptop?”
“In the kitchen. I need to—”
I don’t get a chance to finish before she darts to the back of the kitchen and opens my laptop. “What’s your password?”
I shrug. “That’s what I was trying to say. I haven’t been able to get on because I don’t know. Thank God my calendar is synched with my phone, but I brought it down today because I need to take it to the shop. I can’t access my files.”
“What have you tried?”
“All the usual passwords I’ve always used. Birthday, initials, HanHan, initials and birthday together.”
“What about your anniversary with Max?”
I lift my palms. “No go.”
“What about Nate? Or Nate Crane?”
“That’s not it.”
“You sure?”
I drop my gaze to the floor. “I tried this morning.”
“Or…” She taps on the keyboard for a minute then presses ENTER. The computer beeps at her and gives her the “Wrong Password” warning message. “Hmm.” She taps again.
“Let it go, Liz. I’ve tried.”
She hits ENTER and the computer brightens as my desktop appears.
“What was it?”
“‘Lost In Me.’” She forces a smile. “But that doesn’t mean anything. It’s a seriously popular song.”
Maybe it’s not incriminating evidence, but it doesn’t look good either. “Go to my email first.”
She opens the email client and loads the “Sent” folder. A quick scroll through shows messages from me to several potential clients, vendors, future brides. When she pulls up my contact list, Nate’s name and email are listed, but a search for his email address gives us nothing from the history.
“Why would I have him in my contacts if I’ve never actually contacted him?”
“Let’s check the trash,” she says, moving the mouse to pull up the deleted messages. She looks at me. “Empty.”
My stomach churns, bile crawling up my throat. “I’ve never been good about clearing that stuff. Why would I do it here?”
“Because you were trying to hide something?”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I mutter.
A search of my Facebook profile yields similar results. Nate is in my friends list, but we can’t find any evidence of correspondence between us. Of course, if we’d been having an affair, I can’t believe I’d be stupid enough to flaunt it on Facebook. Hanna is in a secret mostly-just-about-sex relationship with Nate Crane. I’m pretty sure they don’t have that option yet.
I want to scream. “I wish I were the kind of girl who kept a diary.”
“What are you ladies doing?”
I jump at the question and turn to see Drew entering the kitchen from the back door. She’s gorgeous, a younger, more petite version of Cally’s dark hair and sultry curves. But she’s certainly not dressed to impress anyone in her torn-up old jeans and raggedy T-shirt.
“Drew! Good morning!”
“Eh. If you say so. Coffee?”
“Up front,” I say just as the bell at the front rings to let us know a customer came in. “And can you get that customer while you’re at it?”
“Sure. I’m great with the public,” she enthuses, with an eye roll thrown in for good measure.
“I do.”
“When did you get it?”
“Last December. I’d been thinking about it for a while, but you talked me into it.”
I grin as I skim my fingers over it.
He releases a deep groan. “Hanna, you touch me like that and we won’t make it out of here tonight.”
I wrap my arms around his neck and rise onto my toes to kiss him. “Max Hallowell, I don’t know how I landed a guy like you, but I promise I’m going to be the best wife you could ask for. I’m going to earn this.”
Something flashes across his face—sadness, regret?—and he strokes his thumb down my cheek before gathering me against his chest and drawing in a deep breath against my hair.
“I’m the one who needs to earn this. Don’t be fooled.”
November—Nine Months Before Accident
The morning light reflecting off the river is quickly becoming one of my favorite sights. Even when the ground is covered with a thin sheet of snow and the air is cold enough that I can see my breath, I’m learning to like this time. I can’t exactly say I love running, but I appreciate it, and I’m surprised how quickly I’m gaining stamina.
Max climbs out of his car, looking downright edible in his black, long-sleeved, moisture-wicking shirt and shorts. “Good morning!”
“It’s a beautiful one,” I call back. His smile warms me more than a cloudless spring day. I’ve become spoiled by this time with him, his attention on me.
We start jogging without preamble. At first I feel really good, but within less than fifteen minutes, my head gets fuzzy and my vision starts to blur.
My feet scuff the ground as I stumble mid-stride. Max grabs my arm and catches me before I can fall.
“Whoa, careful,” he murmurs. “Easy there. Are you okay?”
The world spins off-kilter before righting itself, and I point to the ground. “I think I just need to sit down for a minute.” I sink to the cold grass, the frozen earth solid and reassuring under me, and try to blink away a sudden wave of nausea.
“Hanna.” Max squats before me and cups my face in his hand. Worry creases his brow. “Did you eat this morning?”
I blink. He’s touching me, and I don’t want to talk about my diet. I want to melt into his warmth. “I don’t like to eat before I run,” I admit.
“Okay, my lecture on that aside. What about last night?”
“Chicken breast,” I answer, mentally amending half a chicken breast.
“What else?”
“What do you mean?”
“What did you eat with it?” His thumb strokes my cheek.
“Oh. I had it on about two cups of mixed greens.”
“Any starch? Grains? Fruit?”
“No.”
He takes a seat next to me and rests his forearms on his knees. “Lunch?”
“I don’t know. I was busy. Maybe an apple.”
He bows his head. “I’m the worst trainer ever. You didn’t say anything about weight loss, and I just assumed you weren’t looking to lose weight. But I should have known.”
“Known what?”
He smiles at me. “You’re just that kind of personality. You know? You decide you’re going to do something and you go all in.”
“You make it sound like a bad thing.”
He grins. “It’s not, but you can’t starve yourself. If you really want to lose weight, that’s okay, but you have to eat to lose.”
I try not to roll my eyes at the advice I’ve heard again and again. I push myself off the ground. “I think I should just go home.”
“Hanna, just promise me you’ll start eating.”
So I can stay this size forever? “Sure.”
“Good. Then you can come with me to dinner on Friday.”
Frowning, I turn back to him. “Why?”
He stands and brushes off his shorts. “I think it’s called a date. I buy you dinner. We eat together. Maybe hold hands on the way home?”
I blink at him and the world spins in front of me again, but I soften my knees and draw in a long, slow breath. “That sounds nice.”
“Pick you up at six.”
Present Day
Liz: Nate disappeared, so no sexy rocker for me tonight. Damn. I’ve known nuns who got more action than I’ve seen lately.
I grimace at Lizzy’s text from last night. On the one hand, she makes me laugh, but on the other, I don’t know what she’s going to think when I tell her Nate is Mr. Hulk Tattoo.
I’m supposed to spend the day looking at wedding venues with my mom, and all I can think about is whether I cheated on my fiancé. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure I need to know if I’m f**king some rock star behind Max’s back before I can choose the length of my veil.
I’ve been working in the bakery since four thirty this morning, and the clock reads twenty to six when Lizzy comes through the front door, her eyes half closed.
“Why couldn’t your dream career have required me to sleep past ten every day, huh?” She pushes past me and to the coffee. “I swear, if I weren’t an unemployed loser, I’d tell you to find someone else to wake up at the ass crack of dawn.” She pours herself a cup of coffee and then dumps cream in it before taking a long drink. “Fuck me, that’s good.” When she finally opens her eyes and looks at me—really looks at me—she frowns. “What’s wrong?”
“I know who Mr. Hulk Tattoo is,” I whisper.
She straightens. “Really? Did he come back? Did you see him somewhere?”
“He was at Asher’s last night.”
She grins. “Oh, the plot thickens!”
“It’s Nate Crane, Liz.”
“What’s Nate Crane?”
“Nate Crane is the guy who got into my bed like he belonged there. He’s the guy I was cheating on Max with.”
She squeezes her eyes shut and mutters, “God, you’re such a bitch.”
“What?”
“You’re engaged. Sue me for hating you a little. You get the perfect life and the hottie on the side.”
“The hottie on the side might ruin the perfect life!” As much as I want to tell myself that my secret was safe, as much as I want to let go of what might or might not have happened with Nate, I can’t stop obsessing over what I’ve done. What if my memories don’t return? I need answers.
Liz frowns. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. But come on. Who could blame you? Nate. Fucking. Crane. You were f**king Nate Crane.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” I protest.
She cocks her head. “How familiar was he with your body when he was touching you in the dark?”
I wince. “This sucks.”
She shakes her head as if still trying to clear away sleepiness. “Okay, so you saw him at the party and realized he was the guy. Then what? Did he approach you?”
“No. The opposite. He saw me and went in the other direction. But this is my life, you know? My future with this really great guy. And the more time I spend with Max, the more sure I am that he’s the right guy for me, and I don’t want to screw this up, but maybe I already have. So I followed Nate outside and told him I have amnesia and he asked when the engagement happened—before or after the amnesia, as if that made a difference—and I told him before and he was upset all over again and wouldn’t talk to me about it. He walked away without answering any of my questions, but I got a hold of his cell phone and read through some of our texts to each other, and it looks really bad, and now I don’t know who to talk to or where to get answers, but I’m scared I’ll lose Max if I tell him and…” I take a long, gasping breath. “Help.”
“Okay.” She sets her coffee on the counter and comes over to put her hands on my shoulders. “This is going to be all right. We’re going to figure this out. Together. But first you have to breathe.”
“Right.” I draw in another shaky breath. And another. I’m on my third before Lizzy’s nodding and smiling.
“Okay. Now do you think you and Nate were just…”
“Just what?”
“Do you think he just came by for booty calls, or do you think you had a relationship?”
“He said, ‘I’m the idiot who’s in love with you.’ Those were his words, ‘the idiot who’s in love with you.’ And then the text messages…?”
“Dirty?”
I nod. “Really dirty.”
“Oh, damn, girl.”
“I know. Right?”
She rubs her hands together. “Okay. I could talk to Nate, right? Feel him out?”
“He’s hella pissed at me, Liz. I don’t think he’s any more likely to talk to you.”
“What about Asher?” she asks, but my horror must be evident on my face because she says, “Okay, okay, bad idea. No one else needs to know until they need to know, right?”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
“Your phone!” she exclaims. “We didn’t know who we were looking for yesterday! Look in your contacts first. Maybe you have his name programmed as something else.”
I scroll through my contacts until I see find his name staring back at me. “He’s here. Programmed into my phone.”
She makes a hurry-up gesture with her hand. “Well, click on the history.”
I frown. I called him last Friday. That was the day of my accident. We had a three-minute conversation. About what? Judging from his reaction when he saw my ring, I obviously wasn’t telling him about my engagement.
“Oh, hell, Liz. This doesn’t make any sense.”
She snatches the phone from my hand and starts scrolling through the history under Nate’s contact info. “But you said there were texts from you on his phone?”
“Yeah. A lot of them. I didn’t get very far back before he found me and took it back.”
“But there’s nothing on your phone, which seems to indicate you deleted the evidence.”
I cross my arms. “It looks like it.”
“Where’s your laptop?”
“In the kitchen. I need to—”
I don’t get a chance to finish before she darts to the back of the kitchen and opens my laptop. “What’s your password?”
I shrug. “That’s what I was trying to say. I haven’t been able to get on because I don’t know. Thank God my calendar is synched with my phone, but I brought it down today because I need to take it to the shop. I can’t access my files.”
“What have you tried?”
“All the usual passwords I’ve always used. Birthday, initials, HanHan, initials and birthday together.”
“What about your anniversary with Max?”
I lift my palms. “No go.”
“What about Nate? Or Nate Crane?”
“That’s not it.”
“You sure?”
I drop my gaze to the floor. “I tried this morning.”
“Or…” She taps on the keyboard for a minute then presses ENTER. The computer beeps at her and gives her the “Wrong Password” warning message. “Hmm.” She taps again.
“Let it go, Liz. I’ve tried.”
She hits ENTER and the computer brightens as my desktop appears.
“What was it?”
“‘Lost In Me.’” She forces a smile. “But that doesn’t mean anything. It’s a seriously popular song.”
Maybe it’s not incriminating evidence, but it doesn’t look good either. “Go to my email first.”
She opens the email client and loads the “Sent” folder. A quick scroll through shows messages from me to several potential clients, vendors, future brides. When she pulls up my contact list, Nate’s name and email are listed, but a search for his email address gives us nothing from the history.
“Why would I have him in my contacts if I’ve never actually contacted him?”
“Let’s check the trash,” she says, moving the mouse to pull up the deleted messages. She looks at me. “Empty.”
My stomach churns, bile crawling up my throat. “I’ve never been good about clearing that stuff. Why would I do it here?”
“Because you were trying to hide something?”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I mutter.
A search of my Facebook profile yields similar results. Nate is in my friends list, but we can’t find any evidence of correspondence between us. Of course, if we’d been having an affair, I can’t believe I’d be stupid enough to flaunt it on Facebook. Hanna is in a secret mostly-just-about-sex relationship with Nate Crane. I’m pretty sure they don’t have that option yet.
I want to scream. “I wish I were the kind of girl who kept a diary.”
“What are you ladies doing?”
I jump at the question and turn to see Drew entering the kitchen from the back door. She’s gorgeous, a younger, more petite version of Cally’s dark hair and sultry curves. But she’s certainly not dressed to impress anyone in her torn-up old jeans and raggedy T-shirt.
“Drew! Good morning!”
“Eh. If you say so. Coffee?”
“Up front,” I say just as the bell at the front rings to let us know a customer came in. “And can you get that customer while you’re at it?”
“Sure. I’m great with the public,” she enthuses, with an eye roll thrown in for good measure.
