Free The Prettiest One: A Thriller by James Hankins Page B

meant to say, This is bullshit, but I’ll go along for now. “Bixby. Desmond Bixby. Parents call me Dez, nearly everyone else calls me Bix. But you usually call me baby.”
    She wasn’t about to call him baby. “Mr. Bixby . . . Bix . . . this is going to sound crazy, but I don’t remember you.”
    The man, Bix, blinked once, then again. “Bullshit,” he said.
    “No, it’s true,” Caitlin said. “It sounds strange, I know, but I can’t remember anything about the last seven months.”
    Bix looked from her to Josh, then back to her. “What the hell are you two up to? What are you trying to tell me?”
    “The truth,” Josh said.
    “The truth,” Bix repeated. “She can’t remember anything?”
    “Not about the past seven months.”
    “What are we talking about here?” Bix asked. “Amnesia? Like in the movies?”
    “I know it sounds crazy, but . . . yes,” Caitlin said. “We came here today to try to figure out what happened to me. How I ended up here. Why I . . .” She trailed off. She had almost said, Why I woke up with a gun and a bag of fake hands, covered with blood . “What I did here,” she added.
    Bix squinted his gray eyes at her again. Then a little light twinkled in them. “Are you messing with me, Katie? Is this some kind of weird joke?” He smiled as if acknowledging that she’d almost had him.
    She shook her head sadly. “I really wish it were.” Bix’s smile disappeared. “But you have to believe me when I tell you that I don’t remember you at all. I’m truly sorry if that hurts your feelings,” and at that she saw him smile, as though such a thing couldn’t hurt him, though she thought she could see that it did. “But it’s true, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t remember you. Or this house. Or this town. The last thing I remember, before essentially waking up across town last night, happened seven months ago.”
    Bix looked at her . . . no, not at her, but into her eyes, and he held his gaze there.
    “I’m lost here, Bix,” she added. “I’m lost, and you might be the only person who can save me.”
    Caitlin couldn’t stop herself from stealing a glance at Josh, who was looking down now. She knew that probably hurt him, but she had spoken the truth. Bix might be able to tell her almost everything she’d done over the past seven months, everything she needed to know to patch the gaping hole in her mind.
    “Seriously, Katie?” Bix said. “No bullshit?”
    Caitlin shook her head. “No bullshit.”

CHAPTER TWELVE
    BIX BELIEVED KATIE . . . THAT IS, Caitlin, as she was calling herself now. So much about her had changed. She looked the same as she had when she’d left the house yesterday, but her manner was different. She spoke in a softer voice than his Katie did. She seemed a little less sure of herself. She didn’t maintain eye contact for as long, while the Katie he knew grabbed your eyes with hers and wouldn’t let go. Tractor beams, he’d thought of them the first time they had locked onto his own eyes over a pool table in the back of a pub seven months ago.
    Even though he believed that Katie—uh, Caitlin—wasn’t who he thought she was, that she didn’t remember him, he found it hard to believe . . . no, hard to accept . . . that their life together was over. But it had to be, right? If she were telling the truth, then the woman he had planned to spend the rest of his life with was as gone to him as if she’d never shown up at his door, either today or seven months ago. One minute he was waiting for her to come home, hoping she had maybe flopped at her friend Janie’s house after work last night rather than having run off on him—like he figured she must have run off on somebody before him. Then the next minute, she was standing on the porch with a new name and an old husband. And just like that, Bix had lost the only thing he loved about his life. And it wasn’t even like Bix could ask her to choose between him and