LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      “I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes,” Vanessa said over the phone. “Okay?”

      “I’m almost ready,” Julie answered, looking around for her boots. “See you.” Spying one under the bed, she clicked off the call and made a grab for it.

      Going to a Christmas pageant? She wondered if she was losing her mind. All those people... The only thing that was going to be worse was Thanksgiving, right around the corner, a day she was going to spend determinedly by herself.

      Trying to feel at home constantly troubled Julie Smith. She had come to Rust Creek Falls nearly six months ago in June, had made a few friends at the Newcomers Club, but she still didn’t feel as if she belonged.

      But how could she? she wondered as she finished dressing to join her new friends for the Christmas pageant. She had no memory older than four years, and no idea who she was. Julie Smith was a name conveniently tacked to her by the people who had cared for her after the incident that had erased her memory.

      But coming out here to Montana to live in this tiny ramshackle cabin sometimes struck her as the ultimate grasping at straws. She looked into the mirror that hung—oddly, she thought—beside her front door and touched the necklace she wore, her only touchstone to her past, gazing at the tarnished coins that hung from it. A specialist in antique coins had told her she was wearing a small fortune around her neck, and that the most recent information he had been able to find about the collection was that it had last been owned by a man in Montana. No name, as collectors preferred to protect their identities, and insurance companies wouldn’t give out private information.

      So here she was. All because of a necklace and an online blog by someone named Lissa Rourke that had somehow roused a sense of familiarity in her.

      Stupid? Maybe. Desperately hunting for a place in this world? Definitely.

      For sure, what she found most familiar was the deepening winter. Little enough to cling to.

      She smoothed her blue wool sheath over her body and looked at her shoulder-length blond hair. She preferred jeans and Western shirts, and the dress felt awkward. Four years, and she still somehow didn’t look right to herself, either. Something was wrong. The hair, she decided, and quickly pulled it back into the ponytail she favored. Better, but the bright blue eyes that stared back at her held no answers to the mystery of who she was. Sometimes she thought she ought to just cut off all her hair, but stopped herself. She’d been able to sell one of her coins, which had given her enough to live on for a while, but that didn’t mean she could afford to splurge. Nor did she want to part with another piece of what might be the only clue to her identity.

      Sighing, she went to get her coat, wishing she had a longer memory, wishing things in life really seemed to fit somewhere in her experience. But she was woefully inexperienced now. A grown woman with a four-year-old memory. Pathetic. Frustrating.

      It struck her, though, as she pulled on her coat, that while Montana was a big state and some conviction that this wasn’t the right town kept gnawing at her, things did strike her as familiar. Cowboys. Horses. Even the occasional family name. Those small familiarities kept her here, kept her hoping.

      She felt more at home here, if she could feel that at all, than she had at any time since her memory loss.

      But what was home? She didn’t even know. And if she ever found out who she really was, could she be sure she would feel that other woman was really her? Or would she meet a stranger inside her own head?

      Stop it, she told herself. Time to look forward to whatever tonight would bring,

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