CHAPTER 4 #4
“No, stay. It’s fine.” The words came out automatically, the same way I’d offer my last granola bar to a coworker who’d missed lunch. “We can share. It’s a double bed.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
She moved into the room with a fluidity that unsettled me. Everything about Mara Bennett was a slightly different version of me—her hair a shade lighter, her shoulders a shade narrower, her voice pitched a note lower. She settled on the edge of the bed and folded her legs under her, catlike.
“Cole talks about you,” she said. “All the time. Mara this, Mara that. It’s sweet, really.”
“He talks about you too.” I didn’t know if that was true, but it felt like the right thing to say.
“Does he?” She tilted her head. “What does he say?”
“That you’re resilient. That you don’t ask for help when you should. That you’re one of the strongest people he knows.”
Her smile sharpened. “He’s never said any of that to me.”
“Maybe he’s waiting for the right moment.”
“Maybe.” She stretched, and the hem of Cole’s t-shirt rode up, exposing the curve of her thigh. “You know, when he pulled me from that car—the accident, I mean, the one you were in too—I thought he was an angel. His face was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes.”
I went cold. “What?”
“The car accident. Five years ago. Cole pulled you out, but I was there too.” Her voice had gone soft, almost dreamy. “In the passenger seat. I don’t blame you for not remembering—you had a concussion, broken ribs, internal bleeding. The doctors said it was a miracle you survived.”
“There was no one else in the car.”
“Are you sure about that?”
The question landed like a slap. I opened my mouth to answer, but the words wouldn’t come.
Because she was right—I couldn’t remember.
The accident was a blur of shattered glass and twisted metal and Cole’s voice cutting through the darkness.
The hospital report listed me as the sole occupant. The police report did the same.
But I’d never been able to shake the feeling that I was forgetting something important.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
“I’m you,” she said. “Or I was. Or I could have been. It’s hard to explain.”
My back hit the panic room’s concrete wall. My heart was pounding so hard I could see my pulse fluttering in my throat. “You need to leave. Right now.”
“I can’t. Cole brought me here. He said I’d be safe here.” She patted the bed beside her. “Come on. I don’t bite.”
I didn’t move. I was frozen in place, clutching my towel, staring at a woman who shared my name and my face and my apartment building and my car accident, and I couldn’t breathe—
And then the panic room door swung open, and Cole was standing there, and I had never been so relieved to see anyone in my entire life.
His gaze flicked from me to the bed and back. “What’s wrong? You’re white as a sheet.”
I pointed at the woman on the bed. “Who is that?”
He followed my finger. Frowned. “Who is who?”
“Mara. Mara Bennett. She says she was in the car accident too—that she knows you—that you gave her your shirt.”
Cole’s expression shifted from confusion to concern. “There’s no one there, sweetheart.”
I looked at the bed.
It was empty. The sheets were untouched. Cole’s t-shirt sat folded on the pillow where I’d left it this morning, but the woman was gone. Vanished. Like she’d never been there at all.
“I saw her,” I said. “She was right there. She talked to me. She said—she said she was me.”
“Mara.” Cole crossed the room and took me by the shoulders. His hands were warm, solid, real. “You’re exhausted. You just worked a twelve-hour shift, you’ve been dealing with my brother’s drama all night, and we just had extremely athletic sex on a bartop. Your brain is playing tricks on you.”
“It wasn’t a trick. She was real.”
“Okay.” He didn’t argue. That was one of the things I loved about him—he didn’t argue when it mattered. “Okay. If she was real, we’ll figure it out in the morning. But right now, you need to sleep.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know.” He guided me toward the bed. “I’ll stay with you.”
“The bar—”
“The bar can survive one night without me. Get in bed.”
I let him tuck me under the covers. The sheets were cool against my skin. The fern on the nightstand rustled in the draft from the ventilation system, and I watched it for a long moment, waiting for something—anything—to prove I wasn’t losing my mind.
Nothing moved. Nothing spoke.
“Do you believe me?” I asked Cole.
He settled beside me, still fully clothed, and pulled me against his chest. “I believe that something upset you. And I believe that you’re safe now.”
That wasn’t an answer. But right now, with his heartbeat steady under my ear and his arm heavy across my waist, it was enough.
The pendant lights upstairs hummed on through the empty bar. The walk-in cooler cycled. The bourbon sat uncorked on the back bar, and somewhere in the studio above the locksmith’s shop, Marcus Mercer slept the sleep of the exhausted and the damned.
And in the panic room below, I closed my eyes and tried not to think about the woman with my face who had vanished like smoke on a windless night