Chapter 26: A Giant Jigsaw Puzzle

Cami laughed off Georgia's question, but it plagued her all the way home. It nagged at her for the rest of the day, and it was the first thing she thought about when she woke up the next morning. The comparison had been unfair, but she had to admit the way she described Mark made their relationship sound boring.

As Cami lay in bed, she closed her eyes and conjured up the image of her ex-partner. She could see his face in her mind's eye vividly. She knew he was a good guy. She could recite his virtues all day long, as if she had memorized a list of them.

But what she couldn't do, no matter how hard she tried, was recreate the emotion she must have felt for him at some point.

She just couldn't feel anything for the man.

A clawing sensation in the pit of her stomach threatened to make her vomit. She was losing her mental faculties. She had to be. Why else would she be having trouble remembering details about the most important people in her life? Why else was she having so much trouble feeling emotion?

Maybe looking at photos of Mark would somehow rekindle the memories of her love for him.

She got out of bed and went over to the small desk near her window, then turned on her laptop and waited for it to boot. Cami knew there weren't any pictures on her phone older than three years ago; she must have deleted every single one before she came home—another thing she didn't remember doing. She had no Facebook or Twitter account to check either. But surely she had kept some reminder of their life together. Their break up hadn't been a bad one. There was no reason why she would have destroyed all records of his existence.

She went through every folder on her computer. There were no photos of Mark. No photos of her life in New Orleans at all. Not one shot of Rousseau's or her apartment or even Sean's gravesite.

When she went downstairs, the maid informed her that her parents had already left for church. It was a relief to have the house almost to herself. She slipped into the study, where she stored all the books she couldn't fit in her bedroom. Her father had kindly allowed her a few shelves to store her psych collection, and it took her only seconds to find the volume she was looking for—her signed copy of Essays in the Study of Abnormal Psychology, by Mark Steadman, Ph.D.

Cami lifted it down from the bookshelf and hurriedly flipped open the back cover to look inside the dust jacket. There, smiling up at her, was a picture of Mark. This was the way she remembered him, relaxed but authoritative.

But as she studied the picture, admired his smile, looked into his eyes, she felt…nothing. He might as well have been a stranger.

She began to read the bio that accompanied the author's photo: Mark Steadman has extensive clinical experience with the diagnosis and treatment of various behavior disorders. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Washington. He lives in Seattle with his wife and daughters, and—

She stopped reading.

As the information seeped into her brain, she read it again. And again.

And again. Except the more she tried to read the words, the less she could comprehend the meaning.

For long moments, she stood in her parents' study, staring at the book with unseeing eyes as words flashed in her mind.

Seattle.

Wife.

Daughters.

That wasn't right. This wasn't the man she knew.

She looked at the photo again. Yep. This was definitely Mark. Her Mark.

But her Mark had never mentioned having a family. Not once. If he had children, he never saw them at all during the entire time he was with her. And he didn't live in Washington; he didn't even visit the place.

It occurred to her that perhaps this wasn't the book he signed for her on the day they met in that little NOLA bookstore after all. Maybe she had made a mistake. Maybe this was an older book, and the life described in the bio had finished long before she knew him. But Mark didn't seem like the kind of man to abandon his children. Maybe there had been an unpleasant custody battle, or maybe he had lost his family and couldn't bring himself to speak of the tragedy.

Cami turned to the front. She flipped over the pages, looking for his signature, but found them blank. This confirmed her thought that this wasn't the right book after all. The heavy feeling in the pit of her stomach lifted.

Then she turned to the copyright page.

The book had been published three years ago.

Cami slotted the book back onto the shelf and returned upstairs to her bedroom, her heart thumping erratically in her chest. There had to be an explanation for all this, for her jumbled thoughts and memories. For all the things she had forgotten—or blocked out, perhaps. Was she repressing memories, or was she inventing things that had never been real?

Either way, her life had become a giant jigsaw puzzle that she had to put together for it to make sense.

She sat in front of her computer, opened a browser and with shaking hands typed in the words Camille O'Connell New Orleans.