I took it from him and tried turning it on, but the screen stayed dark.

I backed up along the side of the building until I stood in front of the large windows that looked in on Merv’s. So there were witnesses.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

His eyes flicked away from me, to the intersection, to the cars passing through. So many cars and so many people with normal lives, doing their normal things. I wanted desperately to be one of those people.

“I have memories of you,” he finally answered. “And I’m trying to figure out what they mean.”

I frowned. “You say that like you don’t know. Like you don’t know what happened.”

“I don’t.”

“How is that possible?”

As soon as the question was out, I immediately wanted to retract it and swallow it back down my throat. What a stupid question to ask when there was a very clear answer.

“Amnesia,” he said.

“Sorry, I…” I looked at the ground, heat racing to my cheeks. “That should have been obvious.”

He didn’t say anything.

“How did it happen? The amnesia.”

His jaw tensed. “Long story.”

“So you’re not here to”—a lump settled in my throat—“kill me?”

The sharp planes of his face softened, and he took another step. “I saved you back then, didn’t I?”

I nodded.

“Then why would I come back six years later to kill you?”

“I don’t know… I don’t—”

“I’m not that person anymore.”

A breath rushed out of me, and I turned, pressing my back against the building. Were we really having this conversation? No one should have to have such conversations on the sidewalk outside of an Irish family restaurant.

I scrubbed at my face, trying to realign my life into an order that made sense. But then again, nothing had made sense for a very long time.

“Can we talk somewhere?” he asked. He gestured to the coffee shop across the street, and I nodded. That’s what I needed. Caffeine. A familiar place. A chair beneath me to keep me upright.

The stoplight at the intersection was green, so we had to wait together at the curb as traffic passed.

I was immediately aware of how tall Gabriel was next to me, how solid and real he was. How broad his shoulders were in the black T-shirt he wore, how the cut of his biceps could be seen even through his sleeves. How the veins stood up on his hands, how rough his knuckles were. Scars covered his right hand more than his left.

He smelled different.

Not exactly like the memory I’d chronicled in the glass bottle sitting on my shelf. The balance of scents had changed.

There was a very faint undertone of pine trees clinging to him, and musk and maybe a touch of lavender. Something floral. Maybe that was laundry detergent.

When the light switched, allowing us to cross, Gabriel kept in step with me. We didn’t talk.

At Declater’s, he held the door open for me. I went inside. The rich scent of roasted coffee beans made me relax. Just a little. It was a normal smell. A normal thing for me to do, buy coffee. But who I was with wasn’t normal, none of this was normal.

I ordered an iced latte. Gabriel ordered a black coffee. He picked a table near the windows, near the exit, and I was thankful for that.

We sat.

My stomach turned.

“My name,” he started, looking down at the steam rising from his cup, “my name is Nick. Not Gabriel.”

I might have been surprised by the revelation had I not already decided long ago that he didn’t seem anything like a Gabriel.

“Nick,” I repeated. “Why Gabriel?”

“It was an alias.” He turned the coffee cup a quarter of an inch and looked at me.

During the years that’d stretched between when I’d met him and now, I realized I’d forgotten a very important detail about him—his eyes. They were the iciest blue. Ringed with a faint trace of black. The kind of eyes that knew things.

His black hair was longer than I remembered, and curled around his ears. His face was clean shaven. His teeth white as sugar.

“Why are you here?” I asked. “Why now?”

I didn’t see any reason to dance around the question. I wanted to know. I needed to know.

He shifted and looked out the window, the stark light of day making the blue of his eyes almost white.

“That’s a complicated answer. A long one.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

He gazed back at me. “A lot has happened since…”

He didn’t finish the sentence, but I knew what he meant. Since that night.

“Are they…” I wetted my lips, my mouth bone dry, my heart ramming against the back of my throat. “Are they here?”

He shook his head quickly. “I don’t work for them anymore, and from what I can tell, they aren’t around.”

Work for them. Like he was a stock boy at a grocery store. Or a plumber’s assistant. There was nothing normal about what he did. Or used to do.

“Who are they?” I asked.

Ever since I’d been kidnapped, I’d asked myself that over and over again. Why had I been taken? What did they do to my mother? Why did they do the things they’d done to me?

I hadn’t told anyone what had happened while I’d been missing. No one would have believed me if I had. But the silence, keeping the secret, meant that the longer it stayed with me, bottled up, the more it seemed like a nightmare, and the more I felt crazy for believing what had happened.