The scene she always came back to had happened not long after they realized there were other time travelers out there.
He’d been strangely excited by the idea.She’d assumed at the time it was because he was as disturbed by the idea and she was.
“How could we find them?”She remembered asking him.
He’d steepled his fingers while leaning back in the chair she now occupied.His thin, clever face had been intent, but his lids had been lowered.
To hide, she now decided.
“Without knowing anything about them, it is almost impossible,” he’d said, after a long pause.
“You believe it is possible to track someone we know through time?”She heard her words and noted his sardonic expression.“Someone actively hiding from us.”
He’d turned the chair away from her and rocked back and forth.
“If we knew enough about them, yes.”When she didn’t speak, he’d looked at her.“You’ve seen the research on the emotional stability of our agents.Their recall devices act as an anchor for them, too, and not just an escape.”
“So you think,” she’d compressed her lips, she remembered, because she’d actively avoided the place she’d left.She hadn’t even tried to find out where her husband, her child had been buried.She’d taken a steadying breath—and mirrored that in the here and now.“You think a place or a person could be an anchor they’d seek out?”
“It would depend on what drove them to travel through time,” he’d said.
“We’ve researched the reasons backwards and forward.”At least they’d looked at the most obvious ones.She’d ticked them off one by one.“Personal gain.Correct a mistake.Stop something from happening.Curiosity.Escape from something here.An accident.Revenge.Save a loved one.”
He’d twitched at that one, she remembered now, when it was too late.
His wife and daughter had died—no, his daughter had gone missing.Stella hadn’t dug into the details to that.Maybe she should.He visited their graves.But there was no sign he’d tried to intervene in his daughter’s life.If he was trying to find her, the logical thing would be to stop it from happening.
Unless he’d tried that before he brought her onboard.He’d have had to make sure that data was gone.He’d been in the perfect position to do both.
And find out that time sometimes pushed back?He wouldn’t be the first to try to circumvent time’s tyranny.
They were always decommissioning agents who wanted to change history in some way, or were afflicted with the delusion that they were supposed to stop a disaster or pivotal event.
Or…she considered another option.What if he wasn’t afraid of what might happen if he simply plucked his family out of the time line?What if he knew what could or would happen?
She felt the rightness of both questions in her gut.
He was afraid of something, but what?
She looked up and caught sight of her reflection in the window.
He sure as heck wasn’t afraid of her.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?”Alice broke the silence that had settled over the room after watching the video of Rita’s lie detector test.
“Is it?”Jack’s brows arched.
Mel shot him an amused look, but she was puzzled, too.What seemed obvious to Alice was rarely apparent to anyone else.
Even Ty looked puzzled.Instead of asking, he took her hand and absently planted a kiss on the back.
Mel sighed.If he distracted her…
“We need to go to Wyoming, to that camp,” Alice said, only then turning to give Ty a smile that was carefully intimate—as befitted a lady recently retrieved from the fifties.
“I thought that our arrival would trigger something,” Jack said.
“Not if we go now,” Alice said.“In a car.”
