Just as he promised, Vincent met her again that night in the park. Maggie spotted his dark shadow at the treeline and glanced around to ensure no one else was around to interrupt them this time. Once satisfied that they were alone, she left the lighted pathway to join him just inside the darkened bit of woods.

"Are you well?" he asked.

The sound of his voice, deep and rich with emotion, sent a shiver up her spine worthy of all the literary cliche that phrase invoked.

"Yes. And you?"

The question elicited a little amused sigh, and she wished she could see his face.

"Yes, Maggie. I am well."

"And Jake? How is he?"

Vincent paused only slightly before admitting, "He has been restless these past few days. I believe he longs to come back to this part of the city. But I will not let him miss his classes or stay out after dark."

His explanation seemed laden with unspoken apology, and she hoped he did not feel guilty for keeping Jake to his studies and curfew. She knew as well as anyone how dangerous the city could be, even during daylight hours, and such restrictions on a child were entirely reasonable.

Carefully, she ventured, "And you two still haven't talked… about all this?"

Maggie hated the idea of keeping a secret from Jake, but she also trusted Vincent in his relationship with his son. After all, he had been there throughout the boy's life, having raised him from a baby. She could still count on one hand the number of days she had known she was a mother.

"No," he admitted. "I had hoped he would come to me. But I suspect he has not mentioned you because he wants to protect me from disappointment. I suspect he does not wish to reveal his discovery until…"

He trailed off but Maggie understood.

"Until I can remember you."

With a soft, almost painful sigh, he agreed, "Yes."

Bracing herself against the inner turmoil which had plagued her since her coffee meeting with Harper earlier, Maggie ventured a statement. "I remembered a little about you today."

"What did you remember?"

His voice sounded so gentle in the darkness, and Maggie wished she could reach out to him. A craving to touch him, to put her arms around him and feel his around her, filled her in a way she had never experienced before. Rarely did Maggie ever touch anyone. With no family and no close friends, most of the people she dealt with in life were just out of reach. And until this moment, she thought she preferred it that way.

But not with him.

"I remember feelings more than specific events," she admitted. "Feelings about you."

Vincent took a few seconds to absorb her statement before asking, "And what do you feel now?"

She gave a wry snort. "I'm not sure, really. Confused? Excited? Anxious?"

"Do you wish to remember your life before, Maggie?" Vincent asked in earnest. "Yesterday, when you recalled the circumstances from when we thought you had died… that memory seemed to bring you a great deal of pain. Physical pain."

Slowly, she nodded.

"It did hurt. But sometimes that is the price we must pay."

She remembered the grueling months of relearning how to use her body, how to dress herself and feed herself. How to walk and force her mouth to form words. None of those activities had been without pain, and Maggie had come to realize that finding her lost memories would likely be much the same.

But Vincent did not seem convinced.

"You have already endured so much," he murmured in a tone full of regret. Her heart ached for him.

"And what have you endured?" she asked. "Raising Jake all by yourself?"

She could sense him smiling, just slightly.

"I have had help," he admitted. "I belong to a community of people who I trust, who accept me as I am. Without them, without Jake, I probably would not have survived."

"What sort of community?" she asked, the description instantly piquing her curiosity.

But even as she posed the question, she felt a distinctive secretiveness about it, as strongly as she felt about him. She would not speak of it. She could not speak of it even if she wished. Her tongue seemed paralyzed at even the thought. The sensation reminded her of how she had frozen when talking with Harper about Vincent.

He paused only for a moment before stating, "It is a safe place. People sometimes go there for a short while, to rest and heal. Others stay for their whole lives. That is how we met. You came to my community to heal for a while before you returned to your own world."

"Like the nursing home where I was in my coma?"

"Not precisely. It is a place set apart from the city. A secret place."

She slowly absorbed this, probing her memory for anything which might prompt some image or feeling. He mentioned that she had stayed there, so surely she should have some memory of it? But nothing came to her. The memories were locked tightly away in her mind, and she could not reach them.

He went on, "I would like to take you there someday, if you wish to go."

"Yes, I would," she answered automatically, before her mind could check her tongue. Even as her thoughts raced to catch up with her feelings, she tried to sort through his cryptic words. "But wait… Didn't I live there with you? I mean… I assumed we lived together?"

She trailed off, somewhat embarrassed by her presumption.

Vincent remained so quiet for so long that she wondered if he was even still there. The darkness of the forested park showed his outline, a tall and broad figure otherwise hidden by the folds of his cloak. But even past the distant sounds of traffic, she could hear him breathing. His deep inhales and exhales betrayed the otherwise calm of his voice, as if he fought to control his emotions.

Finally, he said, "More than once, you expressed the wish to live with me, in my community. But I refused you. I did not want to take you from your… your true life."

"My true life…?"

As if he did not hear her, Vincent continued, "The sacrifice was too great. And you had already sacrificed much to love me, Ca-" He stopped abruptly before forcing out her name. "Maggie."

She noted his near-mistake but did not acknowledge it. And undeterred by his growing agitation, she asked, "What could I have possibly sacrificed to love you?"

His sigh resonated throughout the wooded area, and Maggie waited patiently for his response. But a handful of seconds dragged into a minute and then into two. She deliberately did not speak, knowing that by filling the silence she would concede defeat and lose his answer to her question.

Eventually, he lost the match and admitted, "I am not a normal man. When you were with me, you had to give up all the things in life you would have had by choosing to be with someone…"

When his words failed him, she supplied the same he had already used. "Normal?"

With a great expel of breath, he continued. "My appearance is such that I cannot move about in public as you do. I cannot go into a diner and order a meal. I cannot even walk through the park in the daylight lest I… frighten others."

He continued, "By loving me, you sacrificed all of those things. Our time together was always short. Moments here and there. A few stolen hours enjoyed only in secret. It was not enough. How could it have been? And yet you accepted it anyway, as the price of our love."

The description of his life stunned her. While she had suspected he was scarred or perhaps marred with facial deformities, it had not occurred to her that he avoided being seen in public altogether. The way he clung to the shadows of the park made sense now. She had to admit that he had her even more curious than ever, but she also respected his fears.

His description of her before also surprised her. Vincent made her sound like an angel given human form, a being pure of heart and spirit who could look past what he saw as a complete impasse between them. But she had apparently accepted all his limitations, his need to hide himself from the world and also, she suspected, from her.

Maggie knew what it felt like to hide. But unlike him, she did it in plain sight.

"Will you tell me about how we met?" she prompted. "You said I went to your community to heal."

Apparently happy to abandon the topic of his looks, Vincent said swiftly, "Yes, you were hurt. I found you and took you to… to where I live. There was no time to take you to a hospital. Your face had been cut and the wounds bled badly. You had also been savagely beaten. Bruises and broken ribs…"

He trailed off, his voice too full of emotion.

"You saved my life."

Even as the words left her lips, Maggie knew that they were true. She also knew deep in her heart that was not all. She owed this man her life more than that, perhaps even many times over.

"I only did… what anyone else would have done," he stated blandly. With a deep breath, he added, "Because of the injuries to your face, we had to bandage everything, even your eyes. So you were not able to see me while you recovered. It gave me the chance to get to know you…"

Without my fear getting in the way, Maggie thought to herself. No wonder he does not wish me to see him, at least not yet. He must be unconsciously re-creating the circumstances behind how we met before.

Vincent said with finality, "And I fell in love."

The sadness in his voice plucked at her heart, as if he blamed himself for the attachment, for somehow courting her love out of turn. But she had loved him - Maggie knew. She felt it with certainty despite her lack of memories. Even with only his voice in the darkness, something which might well be part of her imagination, she suspected she was falling in love with him all over again.

"Is that when you realized the bond between us?" she asked.

"Yes."

He tilted back his head, and just for a moment the lamplight near the path made its way through the tangle of trees and left a sliver of illumination on his face. His eyes were closed shut, the tightness betraying considerable emotion within him. And for an instant, Maggie glimpsed the face he did not wish to reveal to her.

She saw a light dusting of fur, a cleft upper lip, and the gleam of light reflected off a very sharp tooth. A fang, perhaps?

Her sharp intake of breath could not be stopped, and instantly Vincent turned away from her.

"I've kept you too long," he apologized without looking at her. "I should go."

She stood too stunned to say anything else to him as he disappeared into the copse of trees.

He did not return to the park the next night, nor the night after that. Maggie waited for him in vain before returning to her apartment, disappointed and slightly angry. Just when she had found a link to her past, he had disappeared. At the same time, she blamed herself for having shown a reaction at the tiny glimpse of his face. The more she turned that single fleeting image over in her mind, the less strange it became.

On her way home, Maggie passed a news stand. They were becoming less popular in the city with so much information now available online, but Maggie preferred the paper medium. She had no computer in her home, only an old television set and a small library of books. She rarely read the newspaper, truthfully, and only occasionally would she would purchase a magazine.

But on this occasion, she paused and stared at the papers. The night was quiet and the man at the news stand did not even bother to glance up at her. After scanning the headlines, Maggie selected three newspapers and paid for them.

At home, she investigated each paper methodically, reading articles about the business of the city and country she lived in. Politics often seeped into the conversations of her customers at the diner, but she avoided the details. But even now, reading about city planning commission meetings and art gallery openings, Maggie realized how much she had been avoiding listening after all. So much of it seemed alien and mysterious, like events which would never impact her. And yet… there was a familiarity she could not escape.

On the third paper, she found an article on the topic she had been hoping to see. While it had no picture, the small blurb announced that District Attorney candidate Joe Maxwell would be having a town hall meeting the following evening to discuss crime in the city as part of his campaign platform.

Joe Maxwell.

The name was there in her memory, Maggie knew, although she could not pinpoint her connection to him. He was important to her, or had been in her past life. That was why she had reacted so strongly at seeing his image in the newspaper when Jake had come to the diner before.

Letting out a breath, Maggie climbed out onto her fire escape and lit a fresh cigarette. She had been trying to cut back, with Jake in mind more than anything else, but that first lung full of smoke soothed her agitated mind. The very act of it brought her a much needed moment of peace and respite from the world.

With a glance at her rose bush, she murmured aloud, "I have a feeling this is a bad idea. But I think I'm going to try it anyway."

After her shift the next day, Maggie returned home only long enough to shower and change before heading off to the town hall meeting. It was being held at a Moose Lodge at the edge of Queens, and Maggie judged it to be within walking distance if she hurried.

When she finally arrived, she was five minutes late but an older woman manning a table just inside the double doors to the building smiled at her.

"Have you come to see Mister Maxwell speak?" the woman asked.

"Uh… yes."

"Just go on in, ma'am. There is plenty of space in the back."

Maggie nodded her thanks and walked past the woman. As she entered a large, central room, she heard a man speaking into a microphone. There were indeed several rows of folding chairs at the back which were sparsely populated, and she chose one in the back row. Only a dark haired woman was nearby, and her attention was focused entirely on the man speaking at the front of the room.

"-isn't what people want to hear, but getting tough on crime doesn't work for drug addicts. It just fills up Rikers with people who have an addiction. Who are sick. These are our sons and our daughters, our neighbors and our friends. And when we throw all these addicts behind bars, we're leaving the real criminals on the streets: the murderers, rapists, and thieves…"

His voice. She would know his voice anywhere.

"You had me going. Radcliffe is a girl's school."

"You have a friend here, kiddo."

He was older, she thought, not recognizing the streaks of gray in his otherwise black hair. And it was beginning to thin a little on top. But he moved with confidence and spoke with unmistakable charm. And his smile was the same. Exactly the same.

Maggie smiled in return, feeling a little better about taking this risk.

Joe went on, speaking to the assembled crowd, "As District Attorney, I will work to improve the drug courts, to divert first time offenders and those charged only with possession of small amounts to treatment programs. Now I'm not saying we shouldn't go after the big fish - the gangs and cartels bringing drugs into our city. I've been fighting against them my entire career. But I am saying that is where my focus will be, not on the kids and the poor folks they get hooked on their poison. Next question?"

A short line of people stood behind a microphone and the next person in line stepped forward. She asked a question about backlogged DNA kits in rape cases, but Maggie focused her attention back on Joe.

How did she know him? She certainly felt affection for him, but he was also more than just a friend.

A former lover? No, that felt entirely wrong.

As he began an impassioned speech in response to the next person's question, it came to Maggie in a rush. He had been her boss. Her mentor. He had given her a chance to prove herself when she wanted to give something back to the world.

Logic rather than memory supplied the rest. That meant she had worked at the District Attorney's office. He had said he'd worked there for years. But in what capacity? Had she been an administrative assistant? A paralegal?

An investigator?

That felt right.

Yes, she had been an investigator, but it was more than that. She had been an attorney. An assistant district attorney, just like Joe. But every time the thought of "District Attorney" entered her mind, it seemed tainted, like the taste of ash on her tongue. She wondered why but part of her instinctively shied away from the memory.

At the front of the room, Joe was explaining his credentials.

"I've worked in the DA's office for over twenty years," he said. "Most attorneys go into private practice after a few years, but I've stayed in public service. My wife thinks I'm a little crazy, but to me, there's always justice to be done."

He glanced in the back of the room near Maggie, and she slouched in her seat automatic.

Joe told the crowd, "Would you all give it up for Jenny, my better half? She has been putting up with me for twelve years."

But all heads turned and looked at the dark-haired woman near her. Maggie looked as well, and the other woman grinned and blushed despite herself.

The room burst into applause, but Maggie heard none of it.

Her vision tunneled as she stared at the woman a couple of seats away from her. Now that she really looked at her, something deep inside her broke like the glass casing on an emergency fire extinguisher box. Maggie not only recognized her, but she knew her. Really knew her.

Even worse, as she stared openly, the woman looked back at her and after a second of confusion, her face erupted into an expression of shock.

As if she had seen a ghost.

Maggie fled.

TBC