Chapter One

Everyone thought they had me figured out. I could almost hear their thoughts when I walked into a room… and that was because there were none. I was invisible. Just a void in the desk in the back of the room. Nobody.

Of course, I was partly to blame. Even I knew that. When I was new to the school, kids had made an effort to be friendly. A girl had even gone so far to invite me to a party, and a boy had written his phone number on my hand.

That was before they knew.

It was inevitable. Secrets are meant to be found out. It didn’t matter how far away my parents took me from home. It wouldn’t make a difference if they even managed to somehow erase all my memories and replaced them with more flowery ones.

When my secret was discovered—I still don’t know how—the other kids talked about me for weeks. Whenever I entered a room, hands went around mouths as girls whispered to each other about it. Boys looked at me with both disgust and speculation. The one who gave me his number went so far as to tap my butt once as I walked past.

I didn’t tell Mom or Dad. What could they do? Whisk me away to another new school? I knew that this would just happen over and over again. I resolved to stick it out.

It turned out to be one of my better decisions. After a few more weeks, my classmates forgot about my recent past. Then I became the void. No one knew how to talk to me anymore. I knew they were curious—maybe they would have come up to me and asked about it, if I hadn’t put on such a resentful face.

I didn’t want friends anymore. I didn’t think I could handle it. At home I forced myself to act fine, and pretended that school was great. That life was great. Mom and Dad seemed to buy it, and the act wore me out every night. Friends would only be an added stress.

At night, I dreamt of him. The counselors were always asking me, my parents were always asking me, How do you think of him? Remember him?

And the truth? The horrible, strange, disturbing truth? I didn’t know.

Did I hate him? No. Did I… love him? No. But I never could think of his beautiful, dark face without a twinge of regret. Regret for what? they would ask. Again, I didn’t know. Why not? I was asked.

And I gave them the answer I always gave when I couldn’t or didn’t want to answer a question: “Because.” Maybe it was my expression, but no one ever asked me that same question after that.

The other kids were probably right to stay away from me, like they did. I was a freak. The emotions I should have been feeling weren’t there. Emotions like hate, fear, abhorrence. But I couldn’t sum any of it to myself. Any other girl would have been cowering in her bed at night, terrified that he would show up at her window and take her away like he’d promised. Any other girl would cry herself to sleep, want to forget and be as normal as possible.

Not me.

I thought of him often. When I dreamed of him, they weren’t nightmares. I could still remember his smell, the feel of his hard muscles beneath my hands. All this didn’t worry me, as it should have. I was the sort of person to accept circumstances as they were, and do the best with what I had.

Mom and Dad weren’t like that. I could see it in their eyes when I walked into a room: They worried. They worried too much. I tried to comfort them in small ways. I had double portions at supper, in an attempt to regain all the weight I’d lost over the past few months. I laughed at the TV when it was required, and I came home from school with a bright, happy smile pasted on my face.

After a time, I had them convinced. Mom began to relax a little more every day, and Dad finally worked full time again, as he had before all of it had happened. They started acting like parents once more. Mom bugged me about wanting to meet some of my new friends, and Dad lectured me about my B in English Lit.

Life went on for them. Mom got a job at a local coffee place, and Dad bought himself a new convertible. My classmates were getting ready for the Halloween Dance, and my counselor deemed me ready to face the world alone again.

And yet life hadn’t gone on for me. It felt as if I was stuck in the same place, the same dark hole all the time. I felt as if he was always there, around me, inside me. With me. His dark eyes were permanently embedded in my mind. As life moved on without me, I realized that I would never be able to forget. Perhaps I would never want to. The experience had been a strange mixture of exhilaration and horror, yes, but I couldn’t bring myself to think of it as wrong. Part of me had wanted to be there. Part of me had wanted to be with him.

Was that just sick? Or was I just mentally unsound?

The time in Pleasant View, Colorado, seemed to crawl. Yes, that was the name of the town my parents had whisked me away to. I thought it was all because of the name. Maybe they thought a more “pleasant” life would make me forget.

But I knew the time seemed so slow not because I had nothing to do, or no one to spend time with, but because I was waiting.

Waiting for something. And if I were completely honest with myself, I had to admit that I knew what it was. I was waiting for him. It hadn’t ended in New York. Nothing had ended. He still wanted me, and I still thought about him.

He was coming for me. I knew it. Mom and Dad may have thought that he was stuck in the past, but I knew that wasn’t the case. I could feel him plotting, planning, searching for me. And he would find me.

My family wasn’t untraceable. Dad still had a firm back home, and he kept in contact. Mom still had long phone conversations with her best friend. Though their lives went on, they hadn’t completely moved on. They still had their ties, and I was really the only thing keeping them in the tiny Colorado town they were using as my place of recovery. I knew they wouldn’t move back until I was in college and had utterly proved my stable condition.

But it wasn’t over. He was coming. I didn’t know when, or how, or what was going to happen once he found me, but I sensed it.

He was coming.