His sheets were not scratchy. This cover was just the right weight and thickness. His body was warm, and he was not wearing hideous black-and-red-checkered pajama pants.
He should be content. Yet he kept waking through the night, discontent, missing Remy.
The two of them were very different.
He was controlled. She was unfiltered.
He was moderate. She was obsessive.
He was a spender. She was frugal.
He was pragmatic. She was artistic.
He was conventional. She was eccentric.
He had something to prove. She did not.
His motives were selfish. Hers were pure.
He should not want her close as much as he did. But an ache for her had lodged itself between his healing ribs and wouldn’t go away.
It felt as if Appleton went upward and outward for miles, separating him from all other human beings, isolating him when he already felt isolated because he had no memories of the people he loved.
He was alone.
Fear came for him then, cold and immediate. It spiked adrenaline into his heart, which started racing. He sat up in the dark, hands braced on the mattress behind him, panicking.
What was happening?
His brain scrambled. He . . . he’d shoved down his worries about the amnesia. That had been necessary because concern about his physical health had been most urgent. Now that physical concerns had lessened, his body was reminding him that worry about the amnesia had only been pushed away. It wasn’t gone.
In fact, it was viciously strong now that he no longer had Remy.
He hated the things he was left with. A whitewashed past. This house. Loneliness.
He couldn’t remember. Not his childhood, not his family, not his career, not Alexis. Why couldn’t he remember?
Jeremiah rushed to his feet next to the bed as a way to escape the fear. But it was no use. The fear came with him.
He needed to hang on to the fact that he’d see Remy again tomorrow. When she was near, he’d be able to breathe.
And he needed to begin therapies that might help treat the amnesia. Not so much because he wanted his biography back, which he did. But because heneededto access one particular memory.
If someone had done Alexis harm and then tried to do him harm, they would have done so on his boat the first day of his trip. As soon as humanly possible, he had to recall what had happened on the boat. And even more importantly, he had to recall the face and name of the person who'd done this to him.
Remy split her time four ways.
One, she waded deeper into the gargantuan job of sorting Wendell’s belongings. Right off the bat, his house got worse when its contents were vomited out. It was like living inside of a junk drawer and it was giving Remy hives.
She wasn’t the most organized person herself. That said, she considered her cottage mostly clean with a cozy dash of clutter. Her elderly friend, on the other hand, was burying himself in a tomb of mess.
Two, she sat in front of Wendell’s computer, trying to figure out how to locate Marisol. She checked for her on search engines, social media sites, genealogy sites—and made zero headway.
Three, she helped Jeremiah search Appleton for his mysterious notes regarding Alexis’s death.
Four, she and Wendell spent the late-evening hours in his living room. Him in the recliner, reading Harlequins. Her curled on the sofa next to the lamp on the end table, reading fantasy novels. It was during those moments, when she’d look across at Wendell in companionable bookworm silence, that she loved her old friend best.
On the third day of searching Appleton, Remy wondered aloud to Jeremiah whether someone might have gotten inside his house and stolen the notes. He pointed out that there’d been no sign of a break-in. Besides, it was likely that no one knew about his investigation into Alexis’s death other than the few people closest to him.
