It wasn’t only the back door handle failing me this morning. Penny called off without notice, so I had to deal with all the deliveries alone. And I couldn’t get the door open. The screws on the stainless steel had loosened steadily over the last month. I’d added it to my to-do list on top of a hundred other things. I kicked at the scuffed and stripped bottom of the door.

Trying to get the door to cooperate while juggling a crate of glass only added to the pall already building over my morning.

“Need a hand with that?” a tentative female voice asked.

I didn’t look back. I only hoped she hadn’t seen me arguing with the door. “Yeah, could you just turn the handle and give it a shove?”

She stepped closer, and her scent attacked me first. Then her eyes, and the contours under her cheekbones, and the hollow at her throat above her black t-shirt.

Everywhere my eyes landed threw another punch to the sternum. The crate wobbled in my hands, and she dove for one side, catching the edge before the whole thing crashed in my shock.

“Thanks,” I managed, jerking the sun-faded plastic in my arms again. She shrugged, reached around me, and pushed the door open with ease.

I entered the bar, and she followed. I’d been waiting for this day. I’d been waiting five years for this day. Anger burned through me, my hands, my arms, chest, feet, all tingling with white-hot rage. I rounded on my target, already knowing this was not about to be one of my finer moments.

“What the hell? You show up here like it hasn’t been five years since we last saw each other?”

She ducked her head, and pink colored her cheeks. Since when did she back down from a fight with me? I stepped closer, but not too close. Her perfume still seared through my sinuses. My brain already fought the memories it brought forth.

A piece of the puzzle didn’t quite fit, and my anger was trying to force it into place, if only to give me some peace after half a decade of disappointment. The light from the open door caught the side of her face, and my knees morphed to jelly. A small pack of scars with two thin lines cut through her hairline above her temple.

My brain told me it was a bullet hole, but my heart refused to believe Mara wasn’t bulletproof.

“Mara,” I whispered, gentling my tone. The anger flushed out of me as fast as it arrived, taking with it the foundations of the walls I’d built to keep anyone from hurting me again.

Her gaze snapped to mine, and I caught a glimpse of her usual fight, but at this point, she’d already have begun verbally flaying me open.

“You’re Murphy?” she said.

Every syllable ripped me open from the inside out. My chest seized, and my guts went liquid. It wasn’t a statement. Oh God, she’d asked me a question. In the back of my mind, I knew it was true, and yet, everything in me began to protest at the thought, the very idea, she didn’t know me.

“Mara,” I began, my voice cracking on her name. I tried again, soft and slow. “Please tell me you know who I am.”

Maybe I’d misheard. Maybe the stress of the morning played tricks on my hearing. Maybe she’d decided to come back and vindictively mess with me. I’d never wanted to be so misused in my life.

She rocked a second on the heels of her black boots, again avoiding eye contact, and then she pulled a bundle of paper from her jacket and slapped in on the bar beside me.

Mara doesn’t know me. Mara doesn’t know me. Mara doesn’t know me.

A chill raced through me. I retreated from her now questioning gaze.

One step.

Two steps.

Until my back hit the edge of the bar top counter. I reached out for something to grab onto, anything to stop my hands from shaking, my mind from raking through every moment I ever stole with her.

I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this.

Forcing myself to look at her felt like inching a pen knife toward my iris. My muscles locked up, and I slid down the lip of the bar, to the rail, then to the floor.

There were still peanut shells under the edge of the frame. I’d have to tell Penny to clean better on nights she closed.

I couldn't breathe. The panic was already there, and I rocked and rocked and rocked.

Mara’s boots shuffled closer until they were even with my lower field of vision. She'd tucked her jeans in the same way she used to. The last time I’d seen her, that was the same. Nothing about me was the same for her though. Which rang like an off-key gong inside my head. When she crouched down, I didn’t flinch away. A small line formed in the middle of her forehead. Concern etched in every new crease I didn’t remember seeing before.

The woman who had been shot in the head sat in front of me with concern on her face. Oxygen rushed back in as I sucked cold air down from the still open doorway. Spots danced in my vision, playing across the dust motes in the sunlight.

If I blinked, maybe she’d go away, and I could go back to thinking she abandoned me. That would be better right? The woman you love left you forever. Not the woman you loved forgot every second you shared.

She didn’t offer assistance or words of concern; she simply watched me. I didn’t feel judged or surveyed. The sympathy in her eyes chipped at the edges of the icy wall I hastily repaired around my heart. It was enough for me push off the floor. She mirrored my ascension, and we stood toe to toe.

“I think I need a drink,” I said, more to myself than her.

Her gaze burned into my back as I skirted the bar and grabbed a bottle of whiskey. I poured a glass for myself and paused as she moved closer.

She’d climbed up in the stool, still watching me.

“Why are you staring at me like that?”

Confusion flashed across her features. “Like what?”

I poured another glass and handed it over. It was interesting to watch her inspect the drink before taking it back in one gulp. Not a flinch after she swallowed, despite the fact I knew that this particular vintage singed on its way down.

With a finger, she nudged the glass back toward me. “I don’t like it.”

I couldn’t help the snort which rose up. Instead of pouring more, I snagged her a beer from the cooler. Another gulp, no reaction, then, “That’s okay.”

I threw back my own drink and let it eat away some the pain from the last four years without her. “I think you should start at the beginning.”

For the first time since she approached me, nerves seemed to surface. “I only know what I was told and what I read. I can’t remember anything for myself past enlisting. It’s like the minute after I signed that paper, everything is erased.”

My body threatened to betray me again, so I anchored myself to the bar. “You don’t remember…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

The laughs. The jokes. Her pale skin still so perfect under dingy hotel room lighting. All gone. The only memory of us she now had revolved around adolescent drama and hormone filled rebellion.

She held up the folded papers. “I have this.”

I reached out, and she placed it in my hand almost with reluctance. I handled the bundle carefully. It was a stack of printed paper folded together in quarters. The edges were soft and a little dirty.

I opened them carefully and scanned the top page. My own words stared back at me in the first email I sent to her after I woke up in an empty bed.

The email that would start one of the best years of my life. I couldn’t read it. The words stared back at me, calling me a coward for being unable to face it after what she went through. I wanted to rip them apart, vent some of the feelings bursting me at the seams. How had we ended right back where we started? I was still the boy who can never leave, and she was the girl who couldn’t get away fast enough.

Instead of ripping them, I folded the paper up and gave them back to her.

I dropped onto my elbows on the bar and stared at the grain in the oiled wood. What did this mean? Besides the fact that I needed to let four years of anger go. Four years of trying to move on from her yet found every other woman lacking. Four years of trying to find her and coming up empty. Four years of wanting and needing and praying.

What did a man do once his prayers were finally answered?

I glanced over at her, and she watched me in the same way as before. Not judging, absorbing maybe?

“Why did you come here, Mara? What do you want?” It was the gentlest question I could ask.

She met my eyes unflinching now and squeezed the papers tight in her hand. “I want this. In the year's time you and…I emailed back and forth, it felt real. As I read over every word, both yours and mine, it was like I could see a tiny glimmer of the person I was before the ambush.”

“Why didn’t you email me or call or come back sooner?” It was less gentle than the first question, but it was the one shredding me right now with its claws and teeth and accusations. Could I be so unlucky in love that the only girl I cared for came home with amnesia. They said fate was cruel. I would call her sadistic.

“I guess I was scared." She shrugged. "At first, because of how I looked. They had to shave my hair off to do the multiple surgeries. Then the scars. And finally, it was the time. I was afraid if I found you after all this time, you would have moved on, and I’d have missed the one shot I had. Or maybe, I feared I wouldn’t.”

I soaked in the sight of her as much as she did me. “And now, how do you feel now?”

She swallowed heavily. I watched it in the line of her still swanlike neck. “Nervous, mostly. Curious too. I’m more wondering what you are thinking. I thought I might lose you there for a second.”

I couldn’t look at her now. Not only had she surprised me, but my heart and my head were fighting inside me. Did I let this woman back in my life to be eviscerated again? Even with that notion, I wanted to fold her in my arms and tell her everything would be okay. But would it? Mara and I had gotten along a total of one year in our lives. And we weren’t even on the same continent for most of it.

“I’m thinking I’m glad you’re safe.”

The line in the middle of her forehead returned. “Is that it? You’re happy that I’m safe?”

“Did you want me to be something else? It’s been a long time since we last spoke, Mara. It’s been longer since I last saw you.”

She cleared her throat and ducked her head again. “She…” Mara let out a sigh. “I kept a journal. Did you know that?”

My heart started a double time against my ribcage. “No, I didn’t know you kept a journal. It never exactly came up in conversation.”

“I wrote about you, often, about us, after I left for the deployment and what happened before then. I wrote every detail down. I guess it’s the only reason I knew where to go, who to search out, once I got released from the hospitals.”

“Can I ask?”

She shook her head. “I am not going to show you. They don’t feel like my words, but even I blush when I read them. It would feel a little like a betrayal if I did share it, even if I only betrayed the me from before.”

She came around the bar, and I reached out to touch her, but drew my hand away before I made contact with her cheek. She grabbed my hand and placed it there, leaning into the curve of my palm.

“Do you know what I missed most, longed for so badly I cried myself to sleep at night?”

“No,” I whispered, watching her close her eyes and sink into my touch.

“Just this. Being touched. In the hospital, I was poked and prodded and spoken of in terms of clinical. Never once did anyone hug me, or rub my shoulder, or kiss my cheek.”

She opened her eyes and met mine suddenly misting over. Darn allergies.

“I didn’t even know I could miss something I didn’t remember. But when I read your emails, I felt you there with me. You were curled up behind me when the pain after the surgery came. Wrapping me in your arms when the doctors told me there was nothing else they could do for my memory. You were there for me as I relearned the details of my life, holding my hand, and arguing with me in my head about every decision.”

She grabbed my other hand and placed it on her opposite cheek and cupped her own palm around my knuckles. Then she drew in a shaky breath. "There is just one more thing I need from you, Murphy, and I promise I’ll leave, and you’ll never have to see me again.”

I waited, trying to stay still. More than anything, I didn’t want to stop touching her.

“I want you to tell me how I killed my mother.”