CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Janice Lemmon left the hospital room twenty minutes later.

As she did, Ash Pierce watched her go.

She hadn't wanted to mention it, but about halfway through their conversation Ash had developed a terrible headache. She didn't want to say anything for fear that it would look like she was being manipulative and attempting to shortcut the interview.

But now that it was over, the throbbing in her head was unbearable. She'd never experienced anything like this in any of her other interactions, whether with the detectives on the case, the prosecutors, her own lawyers, or the other psychiatrists who'd questioned her.

Not even when Hannah Dorsey came to speak with her did she have this reaction. Of course, at the time of that chat, she hadn't realized that Dorsey was the young woman who had stabbed her in the neck, which left her in a coma. She still wasn't sure why the girl had come. Dorsey could have rushed over to her bed and attacked her before the guards stopped her. But she only asked questions, albeit under false pretenses. Was she just here to see if her tormenter was telling the truth?

It was only later that Ash pieced together that Dorsey was also the girl she'd apparently hunted down and nearly killed in the boiler room of this very hospital, only to be stopped by the teenager and Katherine Gentry, a private detective that she was informed she had tortured within an inch of her life.

She knew all of these things were true, even if they didn't feel true to her. But somehow talking to Dr. Janice Lemmon had affected her in ways no other conversation had. Maybe it was because Lemmon, unlike everyone else that Ash had dealt with, seemed to honestly be open to the idea that she had lost her memory. She neither accepted nor rejected the proposition. Maybe Ash just wasn't mentally prepared to deal with that kind of genuine curiosity.

"Can you please get the nurse, Leah?" she asked Officer Michaelson. "That thing with Dr. Lemmon really took it out of me. I've got a brutal headache, like migraine level. I need some serious meds."

Michaelson nodded and left the room. Once she was gone, Ash closed her eyes, hoping that might help ease her pain. But instead, bright images of light flashed in her head, like a strobe light she couldn't turn off. She thought she might throw up.

And then, amid all the flashing, a fractured, confused image appeared in her brain. It was of her standing triumphantly over a bruised and bloody woman tied to a chair in the middle of the desert. Then darkness briefly swallowed Ash, followed immediately by more lights. Then another image.

She was still in the desert, still with the woman she now knew had to be Katherine Gentry. But this time, in the static-y video in her skull, she caught a glimpse of herself in the side-view mirror of a nearby pickup truck. She saw the lips of the person she used to be form into a cruel smile. She didn't recognize it as her own, but she knew it was.

And then suddenly the pain in her head was too much and she retched, too weak and disoriented to prevent the mess from landing on her floral hospital gown.