"I've been in therapy for three years. I've spent eight thousand dollars and hundreds of hours trying to heal myself, and I am sick of sickness and tired of healing. Everyone I know is in therapy, and no one's getting out. I need to do something different. I know what you're trying to say to me, and you're not the first person who's tried to warn me. But I also know that the twenty-nine-year-old woman can probably handle it."

"Probably?" I raised my left eyebrow.

"Will handle it!" she fired back, showing a spark of the feisty survivor she must have been. "Will you help me or not?" she asked defensively, leaning forward to stare at me, almost defying me to say "no."

"I'll help you," I said. The simplicity of my answer seemed to startle her. Frankly, it startled me, too.

"But I have to know something first," I added.

Her suspicion returned. I could see it in her scowl lines.

"Why don't you look yourself?"

She relaxed slightly.

She sat back on the couch and hesitated, almost as if she were carefully choosing her words so I wouldn't change my mind.

"I'm ready to know about the past, Kris, but I'm not ready to deal with all these people in the present. Does that make sense?"

Before I could answer, she continued, "I want you to talk to people about Barbara and Peter Kenwood. I want you to talk to people who knew them and who knew me. I'm ready for that. I'm ready to find out more about the little girl I was. But I still need some distance from it. I'm not ready to try and relate to all these people as an adult, to hear them describe my life as a child. I need the s.p.a.ce to process all of this in my own way. Someone like Mich.e.l.le would probably just run out there and call all these people, invite them over for coffee and have the time of her life."

I smiled in agreement.

"But I'm not Mich.e.l.le. I'm not like that. It's taken me this long to be able to want to know more. I'm years away from being able to ask the questions myself. That's why I came to see you." She looked toward me for approval.

"One more thing before we start," I said, jumping when a sudden shiver ran through my body, "you'll have to be as honest with me as you can. The more I know about you today, the better I'll be able to understand yesterday. Are you comfortable with that? Do you think we can work together?" My heart beat faster as I waited for her answer.

"I trust you," she replied after only the slightest hesitation.

"Are you sure?"

"There's something about you that's honest. I wouldn't have told you this much if I didn't trust you."

"Okay then, let's get started." I took a legal pad out of my top drawer and prepared to formulate a plan of attack. "Tell me a little about your relationship with your parents, with the parents who adopted you."

"There's not much to tell really. My parents are divorced now. I'm not especially close to either of them, at least not emotionally. But I see them often and we have a decent relationship. My dad's fairly easy-going and aloof."

"And your mom?"

"She's a different story. She's overbearing and controlling, and she's always wanted me to be something more than I am. She does everything in her power to try to make me be what she thinks the ideal daughter is. When I was in college, I started studying English literature because she always wanted to be an English professor. When I fell in love with a woman and changed my major to feminist studies, she threatened to stop paying for college. That made me so mad, I said 'fine'. Instead of confronting her, my father called me at school and told me he'd find a way to get the money to me without my mother knowing. That kind of epitomizes their relationship and the way they communicate. Eventually, my mother came to her senses, and I managed to finish college without laundered money, but I've always felt like I've failed her. Even when I was a little girl, I felt like I wasn't the little girl she wanted."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not sure really. I just had this vague sense that she wanted me to be different, to be someone else." As she spoke, her tone was neutral, but I could see the sadness in her eyes. Then, as quickly as it came, it pa.s.sed.

"Can I ask you something, Kris?"

"Sure!"

"It's personal...."

"Okay," I said and cleared my throat.

"Are you in a relationship?"

I hesitated before I answered.

"Do you mean do I have a lover?"

She nodded.

"No, I don't. Why do you ask?"

"I wanted to know something about you, maybe so that it would make it easier for me to tell you about myself, or maybe just because I'm curious."

"I see your point," I paused again, trying to decide exactly how much I would tell her.

"I was in a relationship for three years. It ended a year ago. Her name is Gallagher. She's living in Provincetown now. She says she can't live in the same city with me if we're not in a relationship. I think about her all the time. Now you know something," I said, the pain showing in the strain of my voice.

"Who ended the relationship?"

"I did," I said softly.

"Why? It's obvious you still love her."

"It shows?" I asked, a little embarra.s.sed.

She nodded.

"I do still love her. I just couldn't be in a relationship with her. Intimate relationships are very, very difficult for me. Very difficult," I smiled ruefully.

"Perhaps some day you can tell me about her," Destiny said with more compa.s.sion than I'd felt from anyone in a long time.

"Perhaps some day I will. Now can we talk about you, Ms. Greaves?"

"Sure," she said smiling easily.

With that, we made our plans.

I would gather as much information as I could, keeping track of it all, but only revealing it to her a bit at a time, according to how well she was able to handle it.

It all sounded so easy.

As I saw it then, Destiny's case wasn't so much a hunt for her parents as it was for a picture of her family, herself included, reconstructed through others' memories. She never quite stated it this way, but Destiny Greaves wanted me to find her childhood. It sounded easy, but I suspected it would be an awesome task, made bigger by the fact that I knew I'd be hunting for my own childhood as well.

I didn't tell Destiny this, but in agreeing to help her rediscover four lost years of her life, I was also making a commitment to myself.

For, I, too, had no conscious memory, not even fleeting, of my own life before the age of seven.

Before I was done with this case, I would have found parts of Destiny's four years and pieces of my own seven.

Both of our lives would be shattered.

Chapter 3.

After Destiny left, I walked back to the graphic arts department and looked for my sister Ann who worked for me as an art director. People always commented on how surprising it was that we could work together, and when they found out I was the boss, they always a.s.sumed incorrectly that I was the older one. We sounded exactly the same on the phone, which often confused clients and vendors, but in person, we were nothing alike.

For starters, we didn't look alike. We were both about the same medium height and build, with large b.r.e.a.s.t.s and small b.u.t.tocks, but where Ann was soft, I was lean. Ann constantly poofed up her dark brown hair (she'd discovered that if she went to sleep with it wet, she didn't have to pay for as many perms). I wore my light brown, thick, wavy hair in a simple "wash and wear" cut (I'd never had a perm in my life and had no plans for one).

We also didn't dress alike. Ann wore elaborate mix and match outfits in muted colors, dresses that clung to her and panty hose that were every color but tan. I wore what she called my "uniform." A brightly colored, starched b.u.t.ton-down shirt, lean cut faded blue jeans (I had ten pairs to choose from), and Topsiders with no socks. I'd improved my whole look several years back when Gallagher taught me to take my crumpled shirts to the dry cleaners.

I found Ann hunched over a drawing board, trying to paste up ill.u.s.trations of teeth in various stages of gum disease.

She welcomed the interruption.

I asked her to go out to dinner with me that night. She agreed to accompany me if I would treat or give her an advance on her paycheck.

I treated.

Over chips and salsa at our favorite Mexican restaurant, I told her Destiny's story. She agreed it was a fascinating tale and a great case for me to tackle. She also agreed, as she had so many times in the past, to take on added responsibility at the office while I gathered my information.

That taken care of, we got down to the real point of why I'd asked her to dinner.

"I have no memory either, Ann."

"I know, Kris. Frankly, I can't remember much about our childhood myself. And it's probably just as well. From what I do remember, it wasn't such a great time," she said, loudly chomping down on a chip.

"But I want to remember!"

"I know you do. You've tried to remember before and you can't. Years ago, you even talked about hypnosis. Remember when you saw that hypnotherapist on TV, you wanted to go to her."

"I'd forgotten about that. Why didn't I go?"

"She was arrested for fraud a week later."

"Oh, yeah." I laughed. "Just as well."

"Anyway, Kris, I thought you didn't care anymore. I thought you'd let go of it."

"So did I."

She waited for me to continue, maybe because her mouth was full of tortilla chips.

"But when I heard this woman's terrible story, something in me shifted. It was weird. The instant she said she had memory loss, I felt kind of sick inside, but I also knew I could help her get back her memory a""

"Good, that's what she hired you to do."

Ann had a bad habit of interrupting.

"a" and I knew I'd get back my own. I knew it, Ann. I've never felt anything like it before. Like I said, it was weird."

"It sounds weird," she said a bit judgmentally for someone who believed more strongly in intuition than logic.

"Do you think I'm ready to remember?"

"I don't know," she said, shaking her head in disapproval. "What's changed? Why now?"

"What's changed, is me. I think I'm stronger now. I've been afraid of delving too deeply into this family stuff, afraid of what I'd find out, afraid of falling apart, of staying in bed, of never coming into work and losing the business. At one time, I was afraid of losing Gallagher. Sure enough, I did. What more do I have to lose now?"

"You'd never stay in bed like she did," Ann said, referring to our mother, who had spent more days in her bed than out of it.

"I know that now, but I haven't always known it. Gallagher and Marketing Consultants were all I had. I couldn't risk it."

"You'd hardly want to lose your business now," she said, and for a split second, I wondered if she was more concerned about me or her job.

"But I wouldn't now," I protested. "That's what I'm telling you. I think I'm strong enough to remember, without it ruining my life. And h.e.l.l, maybe it will improve things a little."

Maybe I'll be able to sustain an intimate relationship. Maybe I won't start to cough and almost gag when memories I can't grasp fly through my mind. These things, I thought but couldn't say to my sister.

"How will you remember?" She looked at me sharply.

"I'm not sure exactly. By relaxing, I guess. It's all there, like in a computer. We never permanently forget anything. We just lose access to it. This may sound funny, but I'm going to give myself permission to access it."

'That's it?"

"That's it!"

"But you always have a plan, Kris. This isn't like you."

"I know," I said quietly. And despite my resolve, my stomach fluttered. "That's it."

"What about Destiny, how will you help her?"

"Tomorrow afternoon, I start by visiting her father. She called him, and he agreed to meet with me."

"Are you going to meet with her mother, too?"

"No, not yet. She and Destiny aren't getting along too well right now. Also, the two of them never talked about her parents. Destiny's father told her what little she knows and, up until now, she's never had the courage to ask more."

"So she hired you to ask the questions for her," Ann said more as a statement than a question.

"Exactly. She's ready for the information, but she wants some distance from it, too. I can see her point."