She did. And came up with a gun.
“Jesus Christ.” Max held it suspended between thumb and forefinger. A Glock nine millimeter semi-automatic, magazine still in it. She wondered if she’d been idiotic enough to leave it loaded.
“Where’d this come from?” She searched the room for the fine points of red that were Cameron’s eyes.
“We got it for protection, remember?”
No, she didn’t.
“But you remember me teaching you how to fire it.”
Yes. But somehow she’d thought they’d borrowed a friend’s gun. Okay, so her memory sucked. “But why’d I keep it?”
“You were afraid they’d come back for you?”
His killers. They’d raped her, beaten her, and left her for dead alongside a hiking trail. It was a miracle that Cameron returned from wherever dead people went to talk to her, to keep her alive long enough for the dawn and a jogger to find her.
But she’d never worried they’d come after her later. A part of her had wished they would, to put an end to the nightmare she’d found herself living.
“What else is there?” Cameron distracted her with his insistence.
Carefully laying the gun on the floor, she dug once more in the box. Her fingers touched something else.
Another book. Big. Protected by a plastic dust cover. A man and a woman walking on the beach before a golden sunset graced the cover. She opened the flap to a picture of bleachers filled with cheering students at a high school game of some sort. The more conservative dress of a few dedicated parents was sprinkled in amongst girls with tight shirts in bright colors, their jeans sporting bell bottoms. At the lowest edge of the picture, three cheerleaders, all blonde, had been caught in mid-bounce, their pleated skirts flying, blue and yellow pom-poms beating the air, their legs lopped off by the cut of the editor.
She held Cameron’s high school yearbook in her hands. She could have sworn she’d never seen it before nor could she remember packing it in this box.
“Turn the page.”
She responded to the urgency in his tone. Washington Irving High School—someone must have loved The Legend of Sleepy Hollow—and the name of a town. Lines, Michigan. A fist-sized lump grew in her throat. He was from a town called Lines. Another thing she hadn’t known. So many things she’d never bothered to ask. She wasn’t normal, she’d never been normal. Learning history was so basic to a relationship, yet Max had wanted to create a world of their own, where only she and Cameron mattered. True, she’d had a job, she’d had a few friends, but when she got home at night, she’d wanted to pretend only she and Cameron were real. Home was the only place she felt safe, despite the fights they had. She’d wanted to pretend life began when they met each other.
“You didn’t need to know about my past.”
Which meant he hadn’t wanted to tell her. Her isolationism had played right into that.
“Look at the index in the back.”
Max did as he said, not willing to look their marriage in the face, not now when she could no longer change it. She went straight to his name. He was listed on several different pages, had probably been in all the clubs, on the debating team, class president, whatever.
It was the name beneath his, though, that made her gasp.
She turned to the page listed and stared at a face, framed by honey-blond hair, a face that was a feminine replica of Cameron’s.
“My sister,” he whispered, the hint of tears in his voice. “Cordelia.”
Chapter Two
“Do you feel anything when you touch her picture?”
Max was slightly psychic—Cameron snorted at her use of the adverb. Okay, she had a gift. She had visions, she could occasionally touch an object and see things, feel things. Sometimes dead people invaded her mind.
Now, however, she looked at the unmarked face of Cameron’s sister and felt nothing, nothing beyond a vague sadness that she hadn’t known anything about this part of his life. “Maybe it’s been too long. Maybe it’s because it’s your book and not hers.”
“You’ll find her with or without emanations from that book.”
Max smoothed a hand over the page, unwilling to answer, unwilling to commit. “Were you blond, too, growing up?”
“Why don’t you look?”
Her fingers shook. “It’s not important.”
“Afraid you’ll see I was losing my hair then, too?”
She hadn’t minded his thinning hair. He was twelve years older than she. She hadn’t minded that either. “I said it’s not important,” the words sharper than she’d intended.
Of course, he picked up on that. “You’re afraid.”
Seeing him in his youth with all the promise of big things to come, his shining enthusiasm, no, she couldn’t bear it. If that constituted fear, then she was afraid. “Talk about your sister.”
The girl’s lively smile and laughing eyes gave a sense of boundless energy, limitless dreams. “Does she still live in Lines or did she move away?”