Prologue
Tackle
Six in the morning, and I was out wandering the streets of Boston’s Little Italy, looking for a woman who didn’t want me to find her. I walked past the closed-up shops and restaurants that dotted the first floor of buildings now labeled “live-work spaces” although I doubted a single business owner in this area lived in the luxury apartments above them.
There were worse neighborhoods where Sloane could’ve chosen to hide out. If, in fact, she was here. It was certainly understandable why it would’ve appealed to her. Mass General Hospital was within a mile’s walking distance, and her office was even closer. Not that she was going into work very much these days.
She’d done a damn good job of disappearing in the couple of days I was gone, called away to take care of something I wanted no part of.
I hadn’t seen or heard from her since the day I left the house I had been painstakingly renovating for us to live in. If she’d have me, which now remained to be seen.
When I said goodbye that morning, I had no inkling that when I returned, I’d find out she’d ghosted me.
“Sloane, where the hell are you?” I muttered out loud, scanning the high-rises as if she’d come out on the balcony of one and I’d spot her.
“You’re too early if you’re looking for Sloane,” said a kid sweeping the sidewalk in front of a coffeehouse.
“You know somebody by that name?”
“Really pretty, stomach out to here?” The kid, who couldn’t be more than ten or eleven, held his hand out in front of him.
Rather than respond, I took the photo I’d brought with me out of my pocket. “This her?” I asked, handing it to him.
“Yep. That’s Sloane.”
“Have you seen her?”
“I did the last two days.”
“Where?”
“Here,” the kid said, laughing as he swept dirt onto the street. “Comes down for breakfast, but not until later.”
“What time?”
He shrugged. “Not before nine or ten, after the morning rush is over.”
“You said she comes downstairs. Does she live in this building?”
“Anthony!” a man yelled.
“I gotta go. See ya, mister.”
“Hey, wait!” I was too late. The kid was inside with the door closed behind him.
Tackle
Previous November
I raised my head and surveyed the sterile room I was in. The smell was as familiar as the surroundings; I was in a hospital.
The last thing I remembered was lying on the floor of an airplane that was about to crash-land. I said a prayer, more for my family than myself, but the last image I saw was the same one haunting me now when I closed my eyes—Sloane Clarkson—my best friend’s younger sister.
As hard as I tried to shake her from my thoughts, she always rose to the surface of my consciousness. She invaded my subconscious too, appearing regularly in my dreams. Sloane, who I’d watched grow from a gangling eleven-year-old to the most beautiful woman I’d ever laid eyes on, became my ultimate fantasy.
What little she and I had experienced in reality, morphed into scenes merged with dreams I’d had of her. Ones in which a simple hug hello ended with her sprawled naked on a bed. It could be any bed; I was unaware of anything in the room other than it and her.
“Buenos días,” said a woman dressed in scrubs as she walked into my room. “Señor Sorenson.”
“Buenos días.”
She took my temperature, checked my blood pressure, and listened to my heart.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“Foundation University Hospital Metropolitano in Atlántico, Colombia.”
“Do you know how I got here?”
“Sí. Government officials located the wreckage of your plane and brought you here.”
“Were there other survivors?”
“Sí,” she repeated.
“How many?”