Chapter 2

Chloe and I grew up in the same group home. Hope House was a gray place, and she was the one bright thing in it. I was in love with her before I understood the word, and I studied like my life depended on it just to stay near her.

It paid off. The year we tested for placement, Hope House sent exactly two kids to Westbridge Academy.

Her. And me.

She was beautiful, she was at the top of every class, and she carried herself like she'd come from somewhere. Half the boys in our year were quietly in love with her.

I understood her pride well enough to never tell a soul that I knew her, and she never said hello to me in the halls. Sometimes she'd smile at me in passing, and I'd live on it for a week.

Then, in our last year, somebody dug up where she came from.

The people who had admired her turned on her overnight. I was the only one who stayed. I took the punches meant for her and gave the insults back twice as hard, and I made sure she understood that there was one person on earth who would give up anything for her.

After that, being together felt like the most natural thing in the world.

We got into the same university. I couldn't stand watching her work two jobs and still try to study, so I dropped out, told her to finish, and went to work.

What was supposed to last a semester lasted five years — warehouses, delivery routes, construction, rideshare, anything that paid.

I did every hard work there was, and my girl never went without. She went from a scholarship kid counting change in the cafeteria line to a woman who turned heads in a room.

She loved nice things, and I loved that she spent my money on them. All I wanted was for her to be happy.

I loved the way her eyes lit up over a new bag. There was hunger in it, and life, and it made her feel real to me in a way nothing else did.

She'd tug on my sleeve and tell me I was the best man in the world, and in that moment I believed I was the luckiest one.

Because I knew my girl was worth it. I knew she deserved everything I had.

Then my plane landed, and everything started going wrong at once.

The property manager walked me out of the building where she'd been renting and told me, apologetically, that the tenant in that unit had sublet it and moved out months ago. He suggested I call her.

I was still standing on the sidewalk trying to make sense of that when a Ferrari came around the corner far too fast. I had time to register red paint and nothing else before it hit me, and the pain took the world out from under me.

The driver didn't stop.

The property manager saw it happen and called an ambulance.

I woke up in a hospital in central London with him sitting beside the bed, and the moment my eyes opened he lit up and told me in broken French that he'd found my girlfriend.

My heart started slamming against my ribs.

The door opened, and the woman I had crossed an ocean for walked in.

Chloe was wearing a pale pink Dior dress and a limited-edition Louis Vuitton bag, and she was the most expensive thing in the room.

I couldn't move.

There wasn't a mark on her. Not a bruise, not a scratch, not a trace of fear.

And the dress and the bag together cost more than I'd earned in the last two years. Nothing I made could have paid for either.

So where had the money come from? Had she come into something? Found work I didn't know about?

Then she looked at me, and for less than a second her face showed nothing but disgust before she smoothed it into concern. Five years of reading strangers in my back seat had made me quick, and I caught it.

Something in my chest came loose.

She barely glanced at me again. She turned to the property manager, thanked him warmly in fluent French, and gestured in my direction.

"We're just friends."

She said it lightly, without a flicker of guilt, the way you'd state the weather.

I sat there and took it. She clearly had no idea I'd taught myself French, and I thought, of all the things I did for her, that one really was wasted.

The manager accepted it without question. He looked at my clothes, and then at hers, and drew the obvious conclusion, and on his way out he muttered something about a man reaching for a woman he had no business reaching for.

Once he was gone, Chloe came over to the bed.

I looked at her the way you look at a stranger. Everything I'd rehearsed on the plane went dead in my throat.

Then I put my hand to my temple.

"Who are you?" I said. "Do I know you?"

Shock crossed her face, and right behind it came joy — real joy, the kind she couldn't hide. She must have thought somebody up there was finally on her side.

I'd lost my memory.

"You don't remember?" she asked, and she was almost breathless with it.

"My head is killing me," I said. "I don't remember anything. If you know who I am, please tell me."

She checked the shattered phone on the nightstand, asked whether I had a wallet, whether anyone had come with me. When she'd confirmed I had nothing at all, her shoulders came down.

"We're friends," she said. "You're a backpacker. You came to London to see me and you got hit by a car."

Then her expression tightened.

"The man who hit you is my boyfriend. He'd like to settle it privately, so could you — could you agree not to press charges?"