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thought wryly. The doctors would have a field day if they knew. So would Elizabeth. She’d haul her into a competency hearing so fast . . .
    But no one had to know. That was the beauty of having a secret friend. “Long time no see, Max,” she murmured.
    There was a pause; then the spots of color that surrounded him began to move, elongating and twining around themselves. Sunshine gleamed not only from his hair but from his broad shoulders. The image was strengthening. His arms became more defined. She could see a smear of crimson on his sleeve, and a streak of blue on his jeans.
    Max pressed the heels of his hands to his temples. “Deedee?”
    The distress in his voice took her aback. “I know it’s been a while,” she began.
    “What the hell is going on?”
    “I just wanted . . .” She caught herself. He was a figment of her imagination. Why was she trying to explain anything to him?
    He dropped his hands and half turned toward her. There was a hint of a sharp cheekbone and strong jaw, but she still couldn’t see his face. “Go away, Deedee. I don’t have time to play.”
    “Play? I don’t want to play, Max. I only want to remember.”
    “I don’t.”
    “But you can help me.”
    “No.” He strode away. The colors whirled around him, melding with the shades of green at the edge of the lawn.
    “Max, wait!”
    “No.”
    “Max—”
    “Dammit, Deedee. Get the fuck out of my head!”

TWO
     

     
    THE CONNECTION SNAPPED. MAX DUG HIS FINGERS INTO his scalp and stumbled backward, his mind recoiling. Wood splintered as he fell against the easel. He didn’t hear it. His foot came down on the wet canvas. He barely felt it. His senses were still clinging to the feeling of her .
    She’d come back. She was here. The bond hadn’t broken.
    How was that possible? More than two decades had passed since she’d left him. He’d stopped looking for her a long time ago. He’d stopped needing her. The bond should have been as dead as the boy he used to be.
    He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, as if he could rub away the mist that had stolen into his mind, but it was as useless as trying to rub away sunshine. Or shut out the echo of laughter. Her laughter.
    Deedee. He would have known her anywhere. She’d been his special playmate, the baby sister he’d never had. He’d felt the touch of her warmth even before he’d heard her voice calling his name. It was the name he used to go by, not the one on his paintings or his prison record but the one he kept for himself. As it had all those years ago, her presence had tingled across his nerves like the brush of a butterfly just out of reach. He’d needed only to turn around and he could have seen her . . .
    “No.” It had been a fluke, a trick of his mind, like the phantom twinge of an amputated limb. Max dropped his hands and forced his eyes open, grounding himself in reality. A cerulean sky spread beyond the windows. Stark, whitewashed plaster covered the walls. There were his shelves of paint, the jars of brushes, and the rolls of canvas waiting to be stretched. Nothing remained that didn’t belong. He kept this room stripped down to the bare necessities, because that was how he lived his life.
    This was what he needed. Peace. Sanctuary. He sure as hell didn’t need that voice in his head, stirring up the past.
    I only want to remember, she’d said.
    Well, he didn’t. What was there to remember? What a fool he used to be? How naive and trusting he’d been? How much he’d loved? How much it had hurt ?
    He looked down. A smear of crimson slithered over the maple planks. More paint of the same shade clung to his heel. The canvas he’d been working on lay in a crumpled heap, a deflated, dead skin over the broken skeleton of his easel.
    It was gone. Ruined. But it had already been ruined before his foot had gone through the canvas. The shimmering image, the vision he had painstakingly built in his head, had slipped from his grasp the moment she had