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I blinked in shock and reread her message.
Me: If he was seen doing that, then he wanted to be seen for a reason. They had to be bad people.
Sierra: I don’t know. But I think you need to forget him. Let him go. He’s not the man you once knew. Rebecca’s death clearly changed him. And we still don’t know he’s not responsible for her dying.
Sierra: Also, for a scientist, you don’t seem to recognize or believe facts and evidence when it comes to this man. I don’t get it.
How could I explain the strange pull I felt toward him? I didn’t know how to describe it, but deep in my gut, there it was, and time didn’t make it disappear. Nor all the facts in the world being tossed my way about him.
I wasn’t delusional enough to think the odd “pull” I felt toward him would ever amount to anything, but the world had turned on him. Someone needed to be in his corner while everyone shit-talked him. And that someone would be me.
12
CARTER
REYKJAVIK, ICELAND – APRIL 2021
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been seven days since my last confession.”
“Only seven?” the priest piped up, unable to mask his shock.
I hung my head and ran my fingers through my hair.
Swinging by a confessional had become a habit of mine. I didn’t even have to be in a city that spoke English, or any of the five languages I spoke. Actually, I preferred it if the priest didn’t understand me.
I’d started frequenting confessionals after that night in Scotland whenever the guilt became so thick it was suffocating. I’d unload my soul and leave a bag of cash in exchange for sealed lips.
But the guilt I was now dealing with was pure torture, and it wasn’t from killing someone. It was because of sex. Because I slept with a woman who wasn’t Rebecca.
It took me two years to have sex again—twenty-four fucking months since Rebecca had died to be with someone else—and my conscience couldn’t handle it.
In addition to the act itself, I was struggling to deal with who it’d been with—a damn target of mine. A criminal. A woman with connections to the most powerful men in the world. I needed her to trust me, so she’d open up to me, tell me if she knew who’d killed my wife. But she didn’t want to talk. She wanted to fuck. So, I did.
The problem?
The actual problem?
I’d liked it.
Fuck. What is wrong with me?
“Are you planning to speak?” the priest asked.
“I fucked a woman who wasn’t my wife.”
“Adultery, ah, the most common sin I hear.”
I shook my head. “My wife’s dead. She’s been gone for two years. But this was the first time since . . .”
“I see.” He was quiet for a moment. “You feel wrong for it, as though you cheated?”
Yes, but . . .
“Son?” he prompted.
I’d grown accustomed to that term. It’d bothered me at first, but now it was somehow comforting in the sea of the chaos that was my life—to be someone’s son. Someone’s something.
“The woman’s . . . not good.” I wasn’t sure why, but I felt the need to hide the reality of my situation from this man. I didn’t want him to know I’d taken lives, or that I’d embedded myself in criminal organizations, faking friendships and alliances, all to find my wife’s killer. I was starting to feel like I was chasing more than just ghosts, I was hunting a motherfucking unicorn. I came up empty everywhere I turned.
