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Copyright
Published by AVON
A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in the United States by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
This edition published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
Copyright © Kate White 2020
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com (background image); Mark Owen / Trevillion Images (woman)
Kate White asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008427238
Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008427245
Version: 2020-08-10
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Acknowledgments
Praise for Kate White’s Novels
About the Author
Also by Kate White
About the Publisher
1
As soon as I step off the elevator, something seems weird to me, off-kilter or unaligned—like a friend forcing a smile when she’s secretly livid with you.
Staring through the large glass doors at the end of the corridor, I realize that it’s dark inside the office and that no one else is here yet. That must be what’s throwing me off.
I pull my wrist through the sleeve of my trench coat and check my watch. It’s 8:05. For the first time since I’ve been at the company, I’ve beaten everyone in.
My gaze runs up my sleeve, and I suddenly notice how wet I am. What had felt like a drizzle outside was clearly heavier rain than that, and my coat’s soaked. Shoes, too. When I touch my head, I feel my hair plastered to my scalp.
And then, to make everything worse, I fumble in my pocket for my key card and discover it’s not there. Shit. I’ve either lost it or left it at home. My assistant has never been a morning person—there’s no chance of her showing up before nine. And the earliest the office manager, Caryn, will surface is probably eight thirty. I’ve got almost thirty minutes to kill.
I knead my forehead with my fingers, trying to decide what to do. I could trudge over to a café at Twenty-Second and Broadway. But I hate the thought of sitting there in my wet shoes, feeling the squishy leather pluck at my feet. And the trips there and back will do nothing for my appearance, which I’m sure is disheveled enough as it is.
Then, miraculously, I hear the elevator door slide open, and as I pivot, a young Asian guy in a black hooded sweatshirt steps off, carrying his phone in one hand and shaking out a collapsible umbrella with the other. It takes a second before he looks up from his screen and registers my presence. He must be brand-new at Greenbacks, because I’ve never seen him before.
“Is everything okay?” he asks. He’s looking at me as if my mouth’s started to foam. Hasn’t he ever seen anyone undone by the weather before?
“I’ve been away and I must have left my key at home today,” I say. “Would you mind letting me in?”
“Um, sure. You are …?”
Does he really not know? “Ally. Ally Linden.”
“Right,” he says, nodding. But it clearly doesn’t ring a bell. He’s definitely new, probably on the tech side, a team I don’t interact with all that often.
He snaps his key card from his wallet, swipes it over the black box, and swings open the door as soon as we hear the click. He motions for me to go first, and without having to look, he thrusts his arm to the right and taps a switch. The front section of the office floods with light, unveiling row after row of empty workstations.
“You all set?” he asks, turning back to me.
“Yes, thanks. You’re …?”
“Nick. Nick Fukuyama.”
“Great. Thanks for your help.”
He’s halfway across the floor, tapping more light switches with a flick of his wrist, when I discover I’m also missing the key to my office, one of the few private ones. I moan in frustration. It’s my first day back and I’m going to have a ton to do. I’ll have to wait for Caryn to unlock my door with her master key once she arrives.
I traipse across the lobby area to the glass-walled conference room and nudge the door open with my hip. After shrugging out of my coat, I drape it on the back of a chair by the wall to dry. I take a seat at the table and kick off my soggy shoes. There’s a pen holder on the table, stuffed tight with Dixon No. 2s—Damien Howe’s favorite brand of pencil—and a stack of pads as well, bearing the Greenbacks logo. I can at least make notes, I decide. A plan for the day, for the week ahead.
It’s hard to focus, though. I feel at loose ends, as if I haven’t acclimated yet from my trip. Through the window, I can see that the rain’s coming down really hard now, driven sideways by the wind so that it lashes the glass, with a sound at times like a train rumbling along the tracks. I notice that my throat feels slightly sore, and there’s a faint, throbbing pain in my temples.
I ignore both and force my attention to the pad. I scribble the words “To Do” across the top of the page. And then a row of question marks. I sense an answer hovering, but the words refuse to form.
The muffled ding of the elevator bell pulls me from my thoughts. Please, let this be Caryn, I pray, but when I look up, I see a woman, wearing a black baseball hat letting herself into the office. I can’t make out her face, but I can tell from the height and the shape that it’s not Caryn. I glance again at my watch. Eight twenty-two. Surely, it won’t be much longer.
I try to refocus on my notes, but seconds later, another noise from the front teases away my attention. I raise my head and spot a shock of blond hair, the sight of which jolts me.
God, that hair. Thick, a little shaggy on the sides, and honey-gold in color. So wildly improbable here in gritty, grungy, hipster-bearded, black-is-the-new-black New York City. Once, riding the train with him to a meeting uptown, I watched as two women jerked their heads in his direction, their eyes widening, as if they’d suddenly found themselves in a subway car with a merman.
Damien Howe is on his phone, talking, nodding in agreement. Striking a deal, maybe. He seems oblivious to everything else, but it’s probably not the case. As long as I’ve known him, he’s always been intensely aware of his environment.
He halts at the wide counter to the right of the entrance, opposite the Pullman-style kitchen, and grabs a coffee capsule. Probably dark roast. He likes his coffee strong and never takes milk or sugar. It’s surprising he doesn’t keep an espresso machine in his office, because that’s what he really prefers, especially the moment he rolls out of bed.
I watch as he waits the few seconds for the coffee to brew, seemingly lost in thought now that the call’s finished. I’ve been so good since we split about not looking at him, stopping myself from searching, sonarlike, for his presence, refusing to think of the body beneath those clothes, the sea-salt smell of his skin that used to make me wonder if he was a merman.
Five months. That’s all it lasted. We were ridiculously careful, betraying not even a hint of flirtation at work. But our coworkers had started to put two and two together. I sensed it before Damien did, conscious of their eyes swinging in slo-mo between us in meetings. Someone, somehow, detected a tell in Damien’s interactions with me that gave us away, like Jason Bourne catching the reflection of an asset in the blade of a butter knife.
Aware that the truth was seeping out, we agreed to cool things between us for the time being, and I put on as good a face as I could. It never restarted. And for weeks, months really, it hurt like hell.
His coffee’s done brewing. He secures a lid on the cup, adjusts the messenger bag that’s strapped over his torso, and turns, clearly bound for his office. I lower my gaze, back to the notepad, but I sense his attention land on me. And soon, out of the corner of my eye, I see him striding in my direction. Oh, lovely. He’s about to be treated to my best impression of a sewer rat.
There’s a whoosh as the door opens, and instinctively I stuff both feet back into my shoes and sit up a bit straighter.
“Ally?” he says.
I glance up, feigning nonchalance. “Morning, Damien.”
He looks serious, possibly even annoyed with me. Has a project of mine blown up while I was gone?
“What are you doing here?” he demands.
“I’m sorry. Do you need the room?” That possibility had just occurred to me.
“No, I’m asking why you’re here. At Greenbacks.”
“Today, you mean?” The pulsing in my head intensifies. “It’s my first day back.”
“What are you talking about?” He steps closer, his eyes burrowing into me. “You haven’t worked here in years.”
2
My head’s practically pounding now.
“Damien,” I say. “I-I-I work here. I—”
But even as the words sputter from my lips, I realize they’re not true. I don’t work here. I don’t come to this place anymore. I press a hand to my head, urging alternate images to form in my mind, but I can’t seem to remember where I do work.
My eyes fill with tears. Don’t cry, I think. But a drop plops on the sleek black table.
“Ally, what’s going on?” Damien asks, his voice softening. “Tell me.”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you come here to see me?”
I shake my head. The answer’s hopelessly out of reach. I start trembling, shaking, really. When I glance back at Damien, his expression reads as more concerned than cross.
“Let’s go into my office, okay?” he says.
He leads me from the room, abandoning his coffee cup so he can both grasp my arm and open the door. The work area is still mostly empty, with just one woman settled in a cube outside Damien’s office door, possibly the person I saw in the baseball hat. She raises her eyes from beneath a fringe of black hair, curiosity piqued.
He guides me to a chair inside his office and then shoves the door closed. Instead of sitting at his desk, he drags the other visitor chair over next to me.
“Okay, talk to me,” he says, taking a seat. His voice, so cool before, is almost tender now. “You must have come here for a reason. To speak to someone?”
I search the room with my eyes, hoping a clue will miraculously leap into view, but there’s nothing.
“I’m sorry,” I say with a shake of my head, “but I’m not sure how I ended up here. I can’t remember.”
“It’s okay, don’t worry. We can call someone to help you. Where’s your phone?”
“Um, in my purse.” He lowers his gaze to my lap and sees I’m not in possession of one.
“It’s probably in the conference room. Stay here, and I’ll get it.”
When he’s gone, I think as hard as I can, squeezing my head in my hands as if it were dough, but I still can’t picture where I work. Or what I do. Or where I should be at this moment.
It’s only a few seconds before Damien comes hurrying back. I see the woman with the black hair raise her eyes again, managing to monitor his actions without moving her head even an inch.
“It’s not in there,” Damien says, shutting the office door behind him. He remains standing this time. “Could you have left it someplace?”
“I—I don’t know.” My anxiety spikes. If I don’t have my purse, I don’t have my phone. Or my wallet, either.
“Where did you come from just now? From home?”
I stare up at him, not comprehending at first, my heart beginning to hammer.
And then it hits me that I have no sense of that, either—where I was before I arrived or where my home is. There’s a thick, dark curtain between this moment and everything that came before it.
Damien says something else, but I can barely hear him. The outer rings of my vision shrink so that he now looks tiny, like he’s at the end of a peephole. A wave of nausea swells inside me.
I sense myself start to slump in the chair and before I can straighten up, I keel over onto the floor.
3
A loud hum fills my head, and I hear beeping, too.
Then a woman’s voice, talking into a phone or radio. “The patient is currently conscious, but not alert,” she says. “Twelve-lead ECG is unremarkable.” There are other snippets: “BP:120/80 … pulse 100. Blood sugar is 120 … No HX or seizures, unknown medications.”
I force my eyes open to see that I’m in an ambulance on a gurney with my coat and shirt open and little white discs stuck to my chest. I don’t hear a siren, but the lights must be flashing, because I can see their red reflection dancing on the inside walls of the vehicle.
It comes back in a rush. Damien’s office. Not remembering. The dizziness. Blacking out.
Panic bubbles up inside me and then geysers, shooting to the very end of my fingers and toes. I twist my head to the left as far as I’m able to. A dark-haired woman sits next to me on a jump seat, dressed in black pants and a white shirt. Her eyes flick between several monitors on the inside wall of the ambulance.
She catches me looking at her and smiles.
“How you feeling, hon? Any better?”
“A little,” I tell her, but really, I don’t have a clue, not having a baseline to judge it against. “Can you tell me what happened to me?”
“You passed out, and your colleague was having trouble fully reviving you. I did a quick test for hypoglycemia and it came up negative. Do you have any history of that?”
I have a vague memory of my finger being pricked with a needle, back in Damien’s office. I was on the floor, my arms and legs too limp to move.
“Um, not that I’m aware of.”
“Any history of fainting?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so.”
“It’s possible you’re just dehydrated. Your vitals are normal, at least.”
I lift my arm and notice that there’s an IV needle inserted into my vein.
“It’s just saline, to get you hydrated,” she says. “Be careful not to dislodge it.”
“Okay,” I say, grateful to have someone telling me what to do.
“The person who was with you said you were having trouble with your recall this morning. Can you tell me your name?”
“Ally. Ally Linden.”
“And how old are you, Ally?”
“Thirty-four.” I feel a flood of relief that the number spilled from my lips without me even having to think about it.
“Good. Can you tell me where you live—the actual address?”
“I—” This time I fail miserably. I have no idea what my address is. I rake through my mind, desperate for images—of me turning a key, entering an apartment. Nothing.
“That’s okay, just try to stay calm for now,” the paramedic says, her voice gentle.
“Why can’t I remember?” I plead. “Is something wrong with my head?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get you to the hospital and they’ll figure it all out. And the colleague who helped you said his office would let the hospital know how to reach your husband.”
The bag of saline jostles as we hit a pothole and I realize I’m shaking, softly at first and then so hard my legs are bouncing.
I don’t remember being married. And I don’t have a single clue as to who my husband might be.
4
If I think too hard about where I am right now, I almost lose it. I have to fight the urge to jump off the bed and take off like a bat out of hell.
I’m in the ER, but not the regular part, where you go for a kidney stone or broken collarbone. I’m in a private room in this section completely removed from the fray. It’s the psych unit. The place for patients who are manic or paranoid or hallucinating out of their minds or dangerous to themselves or others. God, how have I ended up here?
This isn’t where I started the process, though. As soon as the ambulance arrived at the hospital, I was wheeled into the main emergency room. They drew blood and had me give a urine sample, clearly checking for drugs. They also examined my vision, reflexes, and coordination to rule out the possibility of a concussion.
Please let it be as simple as that, I’d prayed. Though there was no obvious bruising, I did have a throbbing headache. As I lay on a bed in a curtained-off area, I tried to summon a muscle memory of my skull smacking against a pointy edge of a cabinet or coffee table. But a coffee table where? I still couldn’t recall a thing about my current life beyond my name and age.
In the end there was nothing to suggest a concussion.
Over time, nurses and physician’s assistants came and went, whisking the faded curtain back and forth with a snap, and I waited, enveloped by sounds of beeping and pinging and gurneys rolling by, my panic ballooning with each passing minute.
“The paramedic said that the hospital was trying to reach someone on my behalf,” I told a nurse at one point. It was too distressing to even say the word husband out loud. “Do you know if they did?”
“Let me check,” she replied, but I never saw her again.
And then after three endless hours, I was told I was being moved for a psychiatric evaluation. Stay totally calm, I warned myself. Do not appear frantic or unhinged. I was sure if I did, it would become like one of those movie scenes in which someone starts screaming over and over that she’s not insane, which only guarantees that everyone believes she is.
I wondered if the psych section would be on a secret floor or hard to access, but the orderly simply wheeled me through a set of automatic doors at the far end of the regular ER, and there I was, like in one of those dreams in which you discover a series of unknown rooms in the house you’ve lived in for years.
I’m alone for now, in a private room, dressed in the paper scrubs they gave me. If I didn’t know better—and couldn’t glimpse the two uniformed guards out in the center area—I’d think I was in the VIP wing of the hospital—freshly painted, uncluttered, and very quiet, since there aren’t any beeping machines or monitors here.
There must be plenty of days, though, when it isn’t hush-hush, when patients are shouting, demanding to be let out.
Just thinking about it makes my breathing shallow. I inhale for four seconds, hold it for four, exhale for four and then do it all over again. Somehow the person I am knows how to take deep relaxing breaths, but doesn’t have a clue who she is.
I’m exhaling again when a woman enters, smiling kindly and carrying a clipboard. She’s fiftysomething, I guess, with a youngish vibe. Her shoulder-length gray hair is flipped a little on the ends, and she’s wearing knee-high brown suede boots beneath her wrap dress.
“Ally, good morning,” she says. “I’m Evelyn Capron, one of the clinicians here. How are you feeling now?”
The answer: Scared shitless. Worried sick. Frantic about being married to someone I can’t even picture.
“Concerned, of course,” I say, as evenly as I can master. “I’m not sure why I’ve lost my memory.”
Evelyn nods, her expression sympathetic. “Dr. Agarwal is going to be in to speak to you very shortly. In the meantime, I need to ask a few questions, just as background.”
“Okay.” But how can I possibly answer? For me, there is no background. Only today.
“Ally, are you feeling any inclination to harm yourself?”
Her question jolts me. I know it must be a routine question in the psych ward, but I can’t possibly fit the profile of a suicidal patient. Can I?
“No.”
“Do you feel any desire to harm someone else?”
This question seems even more far-fetched than the first. I’m not even aware of who the people in my life are, let alone who I’d want to harm.
“No, no one.”
She has me fill out admission papers and then says she’s going to give me two printed screening tests. They’re attached to the clipboard, which she hands me. I rest it on my lap, on top of the bedsheet, and scan through questions and multiple-choice answers like, “I was very worried or scared about a lot of things in my life … never; a few times; sometimes; often; constantly.”
“But how do I answer these?”
“What do you mean, Ally?”
“I only know what my life is like this morning. I don’t know anything from before now.”
“Of course, then, just with regard to this morning.”
I lower my gaze to the paper and for a moment my attention drifts to the sheet covering my legs. An image blooms in my mind. I’m sitting on a big white sofa with a laptop resting on my thighs. It’s a sofa in my apartment, I feel sure.
“I’m a writer,” I announce to Evelyn, my eyes pricking with tears. “I work out of my apartment sometimes.”
“That’s good, Ally,” she says.
A split second later, another image trips over the first. I’m standing at a window on a high floor, coffee mug in hand, staring at Manhattan stretched out before me. It’s a stunning view, lots of sky and silvery buildings, and I’m smiling. I turn to say something to someone sitting behind me. A man.
“I live by Lincoln Center,” I blurt out this time. “In—in the West Sixties.”
“Very good. Anything else?”
My brain is trying to claw its way out from a landslide.
“No, nothing else,” I say, feeling desperate again.
“Try to relax. Let things come on their own.”
And then, as if by magic, more images appear, slowly at first and then in rapid succession, flooding my mind. With my words tumbling over one another, I share each new detail with Evelyn. She scribbles them down quickly—is she fearful they might vanish again? Soon, it’s no longer a collection of fragments but something that seems whole, like a tapestry. Me.