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David did that stupid thing with his fingers while he frowned and pondered. It irritated me, though I couldn’t explain why. To distract myself, I cast my eyes around the room. The office was plush with its leather couch and expensive artwork, tucked away in the surgical wing of an exclusive, private hospital. It was how the other half of the medical profession lived—plastic surgeons hidden away from the masses. What was I doing here? What the fuck did David know about people? I knew for a fact that David wasn’t reconstructing burn victims or patching up war vets. Nah, it was all about vanity. Meg’s weird-looking nose was his own fucking work.

David cleared his throat and got to his feet. He walked around the desk and leaned back against it. “How much do you know about Ash’s childhood?”

I eyed him warily. “Not much. He was in foster care after his mom died… families and group homes. I think he moved around a lot.”

David looked thoughtful and drummed his fingers on the edge of the desk. “Have you ever noticed gaps in his memories? I thought at first he was just being reticent. I know he doesn’t like me, but I’ve concluded that there seem to be whole sections he can’t remember at all.”

I stared at him, the unease in the pit of my stomach getting worse by the minute. Ash said he often avoided David because he felt like he was trying to catch him out. It had never made any sense to me, but it was beginning to. “I don’t understand. His childhood was awful. How could he forget that?”

David shook his head sadly. “Perhaps that’s the point, Pete.”

“What do you mean?”

He exhaled slowly and measured his words. “It’s occurred to me in the past that Ash has some repressed memories. Based on what you’ve told me and behavior I’ve observed in him, I think we have to consider the possibility that he suffered some sort of sexual trauma as a child.”

My mouth opened and shut several times before I found it in me to speak. “You think he was raped?”

The answering silence was deafening. I sat back in my seat as horror, grief, and emotions I couldn’t even name hit me like a truck. “I don’t understand.”

Still, David was silent. He knew I was lying. I
did
understand. I understood completely. I just didn’t want to. I took a deep breath. “You think he’s forgotten some fucked-up shit and now he’s starting to remember?”

“You said he heard a voice in the street he thought he recognized,” David said. “Perhaps it sounded like someone he used to know. You said it seemed to serve as a trigger for the breakdown he’s having now.”

I shook my head slowly. “I thought they disproved all that repressed-memory bullshit.”

“It’s rare, and it has been badly exploited in recent years, but it remains a real condition.” David leaned forward. “Pete, I know you don’t want to believe it, and believe me, neither do I, but I saw this in Ash the moment I met him. Something happened to that boy—something terrible.”

His hand twitched. He seemed about to reach out to me, but he changed his mind at the last minute. Sensibly, it seemed, because the way I was feeling, I probably would have punched him. Anger flared and I clenched my fists. “No, you can’t tell me you knew this all along. How the fuck could you know? You don’t even know Ash.”

To his credit, David didn’t react to my aggression. He just took it all and shook his head with those damn patient eyes. “Maybe not, but you know it’s a possibility, or you wouldn’t be here.”

It was my turn to be silent then, because he was right. The more I turned it over in my mind, the more it began to add up. I’d never noticed the gaps in Ash’s memory before, but suddenly they seemed ridiculously obvious. I felt foolish and stupid. I’d always known there was something horrific in Ash’s past. I’d even contemplated the possibility of him being abused in foster care, but it had never, ever occurred to me that
Ash
might not remember it had happened.

I felt sick, sicker than I’d ever felt in my life. The room spun and sharp pain stabbed at my hands. I looked down. Unwittingly, I’d curled my hands so tight my nails were about to draw blood from my palms. Impulsively, I clenched them harder, tighter. The pain was welcome; I needed the distraction.

Shit.

“There’s a cut on his arm,” I blurted abruptly. “He won’t tell me how he got it.”

“Self-harm fits with the profile,” David said casually, too casually. “Has he done it before? Ellie mentioned something once that made me think it had perhaps been a problem in the past.”

My mind flashed to the scar on the palm of Ash’s hand. “Once, I think… soon after we met. I was never sure.”

David didn’t push. The situation had snowballed so fast that the details were becoming irrelevant. Nothing changed the fact that Ash needed help, and there wasn’t much that could make things any worse. I scrubbed a shaking hand over my face. “What do I do now?”

“You go home and take care of him,” David said. “There’s nothing else you can do right now, not without more to go on. I’m going to make some calls and see if I can find out a bit more about the foster care system in Texas.”

I was missing something. My brain was working too slowly to keep up. “What good is that going to do?”

David reached for a leather journal and scribbled a note. “I have Ash’s social security number from when I set up his health insurance. I have some people I can contact. If we can find out where he was and when, we’ll have a better chance of finding out what happened to him.”

I nodded slowly. “What if you’re wrong?”

David sighed. “We have no way of knowing unless we look, and we can’t get the right help without knowing exactly what we’re dealing with. Pete, this isn’t what I want for Ash, you must know that.”

I wanted to believe him. The fact that he was willing to delve into something so horrific should have been enough, but it wasn’t. Even as we spent the next hour trying to patch together what little we both knew of Ash’s childhood, I still rejected every effort he made to comfort me. Perhaps it was because I knew the moment I accepted his sympathy I’d have to truly face the possibility that my worst nightmare… that someone I loved had been… fuck, had been
raped
…. No. I wasn’t ready for that, not by a long shot. Dazed detachment was my only hope.

It was a tough few hours, and the atmosphere was strained. Something akin to relief washed over me when David finally told me to go home. My head was in bits, but there was nothing else I could do. I gathered my shit and headed for the door. I was halfway through it when what was left of my world came suddenly tumbling down.

“Pete, you said Ash knows who the voice in his head is. Who is it?”

Wordlessly, I handed him the torn strip of newspaper I’d shoved in my pocket.

Color leached from David’s face. “Are you sure?”

I shrugged wearily. I was bone tired, and I didn’t have the energy for any more speculation. “I attended the call when that dude beat his wife. Ash saw his picture in the paper and thought he recognized him. He doesn’t know how, but it really freaked him out.”

David’s hand trembled as he pulled the paper closer to him. It startled me. Until that moment, he’d been so calm and composed. A dull throb began in my head as I stepped back into his office. “What is it?”

David tore his gaze from the image on the paper. “Pete, have you seen the news recently?”

I shook my head. Ash had been all I’d seen or heard in days. A nuclear apocalypse could have happened and I wouldn’t have noticed.

David walked behind his desk and lifted his briefcase. He opened it and retrieved a newspaper. He handed it to me. I unfolded it slowly, revealing the front page, and there staring back at me was the same photo I clutched in my other hand.

No, no, no. this can’t be happening….

If the newspaper was right, Daryl Hunter had also raped and murdered the street kid in the park.

And Ash had known his voice.

H
ORROR
swept over me as I stared at the newspaper. It was the closest to fainting I’d ever come. I spent another two hours in David’s office, but there were black periods of that time I just wouldn’t remember later. I couldn’t comprehend what I was faced with; it didn’t seem real. It
couldn’t
be real.

The shock on David’s face mirrored mine, but he kept his head enough to see reason. He poured me a whiskey before he shook me slightly and sent me home. The way he saw it, even if Daryl Hunter was guilty of the crimes he’d been charged with, and even if Ash did indeed know him somehow, our course of action remained the same. Whatever had happened to Ash in the past, he needed me now.

I wandered out of the hospital in a daze, absently promising not to ignore David’s calls. I felt numb as the cold air hit me. The intense grief and distress had ebbed away, and instead I was left with an all-consuming urge to run home to Ash. I’d carried a pull in my chest for him since the day I met him, but as I stood in the street and stared at the sidewalk, it became so powerful it hurt.

In my pocket, my cell phone vibrated. It rang and rang until I finally focused enough to retrieve it. I was too late to catch the call, but before I could figure out who it was, a message from Joe flashed up.

He’s awake. Breathing bad. Worried. J.

Alarmed, I called him straight back and within a few moments I knew he was right to be concerned. I hit Mick’s speed dial, knowing he was probably closer than I was, and prayed he wasn’t stuck on a job. Luckily, he was nearby, but I wasn’t.

I ran for the subway, but it was a long half hour before I leaped from the train in Lincoln Park, jumped the barriers, and ran home as fast as the crowded streets would allow me. I rounded the corner to the block my building was on and caught sight of the ambulance parked by the entrance. A paramedic I vaguely recognized from another watch sat idly in the driver seat with his eyes closed. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I felt relief that Mick had gone in alone.

I took the stairs two at a time and collided with Joe as I reached the top. “What happened?”

Joe shook his head, his eyes wide with worry. “I don’t know, man. He just woke up coughing and he couldn’t stop. I gave him that inhaler shit, but he couldn’t breathe it in. I’m sorry, dude. I didn’t know what to do.”

I put my hand on his shoulder to tell him it wasn’t his fault, that he’d done all he could, but the moment I saw the open door of the apartment I forgot all about him.

Ash was in the living room when I finally got inside. He was on the couch with his head in his hands. Mick was beside him, holding an oxygen mask over his face, but I stopped short when I realized that was the only contact between them. Something wasn’t right. Mick had a way with patients in respiratory distress. How many times had I watched him put his arm around them and talk to them until they were calm enough to breathe on their own? But he wasn’t doing that. He was hardly touching Ash at all, and apart from the awful sounds coming from Ash’s chest, the room was completely silent.

Confusion left me frozen in the doorway. Mick called my name once, twice, before it finally clicked that the patient he was treating was
Ash
. Ash, who couldn’t bear to be touched by almost anybody. Ash, who jumped a mile at the sound of an unfamiliar voice. Mick wasn’t helping him because he couldn’t. No one could. It had to be me.

I moved forward and took Mick’s place beside Ash. He didn’t react until I brought my hand to his face and put the other on his back. Then he leaned into me, tilting his head toward me. Maybe it was an instinctive reaction, but I felt some relief that he knew I was there. I reached out and took his hand. It was cold and clammy, but he squeezed my fingers in answer.

Mick was pissed. I could tell by the glares he sent my way over his clipboard, but I ignored him and focused on calming Ash down enough to breathe. I knew what had happened. I’d seen it before in pneumonia patients. He’d coughed until he’d exhausted himself, then panicked when he couldn’t catch his breath. Combined with his already weakened lungs, it was an ordeal he didn’t need. The rasp in his chest was more pronounced than it had ever been, and he desperately needed the IV Mick had put in his hand.

In a way that was far too reminiscent of just hours before, I rubbed his back and talked nonsense to him. I felt awful for leaving him. He’d been sick a few times the night before, but stupidly, though I knew he wasn’t eating or drinking, I hadn’t stopped to consider dehydration, or the effect it was having on his lucidity. A tiny part of me tried to convince me that perhaps it explained the psychotic episode I’d witnessed, but of course, I knew deep down it didn’t.

It took a while, but eventually, Ash’s breathing began to improve. Relieved, I squeezed his shoulder and nudged him a little bit closer to me. “Still with me, fucker?”

He turned his head slowly to look at me. One arm came up to bat the oxygen mask away. “I’m okay.”

I slid off the sofa and crouched in front of him. With his gray skin and shaking hands, he didn’t look okay, not even close. “Does your chest still hurt?”

He nodded, and as hard as he tried to hide it, his face contorted in a grimace.

Mick glanced up from his paperwork. “I gave him a shot. It should kick in soon.”

I held Ash’s eyes for a long moment. They were clouded with discomfort, but despite the pain he was in, they were more alert than they’d been in days. For the first time in a long time, I recognized the person staring back at me. For reasons I didn’t quite understand, his gaze was mesmerizing, like I’d never seen it before.

Joe appeared in the doorway and broke the spell. He held an oxygen canister in his hands, but he’d been gone for ages, too long for a simple trip down the stairs. Perhaps he’d been there all along. Who knew?

Mick cleared his throat and called Ash’s name. “I need to borrow Pete for a few minutes. Keep breathing that mask, okay? He won’t be long.”

I thought about refusing, but Mick wasn’t asking, and he wasn’t above causing a scene if I didn’t let him have his way. I waited for Joe to reach Ash before I got up and followed him into the bedroom.