The One (Spade Hotel #5)

Chapter 1

ONE

Rhett

One Day Ago

I remembered …

Not like it was yesterday.

More like it was less than an hour ago.

Except even that was too much. So was a handful of minutes.

A single second. Yes, that felt like a more accurate amount of time.

That haunting memory, the one I remembered, didn’t just come into my head and leave at random.

It repeated.

Endlessly.

A track that skipped—not forward, but back—for almost fifteen years.

Five thousand four hundred seventy-four days of repeats had passed.

Every tomorrow looked like a mirror of the previous day.

And it left me with the most relentless, miserable ache.

One that consumed me. One that refused to let me move on.

My brain was shackled, my hands tensed, fingers bent into fists as though they were locked with arthritis.

That was how I lived my life.

A ball of anger that was fueled by pain.

One thing took it all away.

It made my fingers straighten and my arms outstretch.

It made me expel the loudest, most guttural exhale.

It made the darkness turn to light.

Her.