For three days, Grace Holloway was herself again. Or the version she preferred to call herself. No headaches. No lost time. No strange notes. No waking with dirt beneath her nails or blood she could not explain. She slept eight hours each night. She attended a luncheon, chaired a committee meeting, sent flowers to a widow she barely knew, and was told twice she looked radiant. Grace almost laughed. Perhaps it had been stress. Hormones. Some temporary neurological storm. Perhaps Dr. Julian Vale had frightened her with his expensive calm and ominous questions. Perhaps all of it was passing. By the fourth evening, she was nearly certain. --- The package arrived at 6:40. No return address. Inside was a single cream card. Same time next week. The others adore you. Nothing else. Grace stood in her foyer for a long time. Then, despite every rational instinct, she dressed. Not elegantly. Automatically. As if following remembered instructions her conscious mind had never learned. --- The t...
Three days after the church incident, Grace Holloway lost nearly six hours. She remembered leaving work. Rain on the windshield. A voicemail from her mother. The smell of wet wool. Then - Music. Heavy bass, muffled through walls. Grace opened her eyes while lying on a velvet chaise lounge in a room lit red and gold. Her head throbbed. Bodies moved everywhere around her - half-dressed, masked, laughing too loudly, touching without tenderness. Champagne spilled. Someone cried and kept laughing. A man in a suit was on his knees praying or vomiting, or something else entirely. Grace could not tell which, until she noticed his head bobbing up and down. No one seemed surprised to see her awake. Someone passed and kissed her forehead. “Back from the dead,” he said. Grace sat upright too fast. She was clothed, mostly. Expensively, but incorrectly. One heel missing. Blouse buttoned wrong. Her hands trembled. There were dark stains on one cuff. Wine, she thought instantly. Blood, she the thought...