Page 87 of Sinful Palace

He frowned. “Willow, you really don’t have to do that right now.”

“I need something to distract me,” I murmured. “I can’t just lie here forever.”

“I know, but it hasn’t even been a week since your dad died. We should reschedule.”

I lifted my chin. “No. I owe this to you, and I want to do it. Just give me a minute to get ready.”

I slowly dragged myself out of bed and went into the bathroom to splash my face with cold water. When I looked in the mirror, I almost didn’t recognize myself. My skin was pallid, and my cheeks were hollow. I looked like a zombie.

I took another deep breath. Then I wrapped a thick chenille bathrobe around myself and headed back out to the bedroom. Myla was standing by the main door with Logan, nodding at something he was saying. Her face was bare, and she was wearing a camel-colored wrap coat, black pants and ballet flats; a far cry from the black domme outfits and thick makeup she usually sported in the Wonderland Club.

“Hi,” I murmured.

Myla came over to me and tentatively rubbed my shoulder. “Hey,” she said softly. “I’m so sorry about your dad.”

“Thanks.”

“We can talk about it, if you want. Or we can just hang out. Whatever you need.”

I shook my head. “I want to do what we planned, if that’s okay.”

“Of course. Just remember, we can stop anytime you want.” She gave me a sympathetic smile and gestured to the sofas near the coffee table on the other side of the room. “Let’s go and sit down.”

Logan followed us to the sofas and stood near Myla, watching her with slightly narrowed eyes as she took a seat and set her black handbag down on the table. I sat across from her.

“When we arranged this session, you mentioned that you have some traumatic memories you’d like to recover,” she began, looking at me with one brow lifted.

“Yes. It’s just one night I want to remember.”

“Can you tell me more about that?”

I swallowed thickly. “About five years ago, I did something… bad.” I averted my eyes from Logan as I spoke, cheeks warming with shame. “I know I did it, but I don’t actually remember it. I don’t even remember most of the weeks afterwards. My mom told me I was sick, but that’s not true.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, and I’ll probably never get the truth out of her, so asking isn’t really an option.”

Myla nodded slowly. “Okay. I should get some bad news out of the way first,” she said. “Back at my old clinic, I was able to help a few patients recover lost memories, but the overall success rate is pretty low. It’s not an exact science, which makes it difficult, and in a lot of cases, the memories are simply gone. So I need to warn you about that. I don’t want to give you false hope and make you think I have some sort of miracle remedy.”

“My memories aren’t gone. They’re still in here.”

Her forehead wrinkled. “How do you know that?”

“A few weeks ago, I started having what I call ‘flashes’,” I explained. “I’d think about the thing I forgot, and suddenly I’d see something from that night in my mind’s eye. Just for a split second. It’s only happened a couple of times, but I can tell it’s a real memory. It’s just not long enough to actually see it all properly.”

Myla smiled. “Well, that’s a positive sign. It puts you ahead of about eighty percent of other people who want to recover lost or repressed memories.”

“So you think she repressed it?” Logan asked, brows furrowing. “That’s why she forgot?”

Myla glanced up at him. “I can’t be sure without knowing all of the facts. There’s a lot of reasons someone might forget something. It can be caused by physical trauma, like a head injury, or other physical conditions like thyroid issues, brain tumors, or infections.” She held up a hand and started listing more reasons, using her fingers to denote each one. “It can also be caused by severe stress and emotional issues, vitamin deficiencies, incorrect medication dosages, alcohol and drug problems, or different forms of dementia. All sorts of things.”

“I hit my head that night,” I said. “I fell off my Vespa and hit the road pretty hard.”

“That could be the cause,” Myla replied. “Sometimes the brain doesn’t store memories for a certain period after a head injury, which means there’s literally nothing to recover. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here, seeing as you claim to have these flashes.”

“Uh-huh.” I leaned forward. “So what can we do?”

“There’s two things I’d like to suggest, and it’s up to you which one we go with in the end.”

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