“I’m not James. Not anymore.” He sounded calm and looked it too. His body swayed in rhythm with the carriage. “Yes, I concealed the truth about that night from you and from the Inspector. I lied to you about where I came from. About thepeopleI came from.”
“To protect yourself,” she said, her voice cracking.
He set his jaw. “Yes. I didn’t want to go back to them. I couldn’t—” He shook his head, his throat working as he tensed. “I couldn’t go back.”
The way he said it, not returning to his family wasn’t just a desire. It sounded like an impossibility. Maybe even a fear. Leo licked her lips, considering why that would be.
“Because you didn’t kill me like you were supposed to?”
Jasper cut his eyes from hers, gazing toward the window. They were starting to enter the urban streets of London, but she thought he might be seeing a long-lost past instead.
“Saying my uncle was disappointed is an understatement,” he replied. “With the news the next morning that you were found alive, hiding in the attic, he was ashamed. Humiliated. And that made him angry.”
Leo recalled the bruises distorting Jasper’s face when she’d first met him at Scotland Yard four days later. “He beat you.”
He turned from the window and met her eyes. “That isn’t why I couldn’t go back. I wasn’t afraid of him or his fists. I was afraid that the next time, I wouldn’t be able to hide the person they wanted me to kill.”
Leo’s stomach dropped. It wasn’t something she’d considered before.
He held her stare. “I’m not a murderer. If I’d stayed James Carter, I would have become one.”
Words failed her. She’d been so angry, grasping for reasons why he would have kept such a secret from her and from the Inspector, that she hadn’t tried to think about that night from his perspective. Or what a life as James Carter would have held in store for him.
Without warning, Leo’s anger dissipated. In its place came an equally unexpected rush of gratitude. She didn’t know if she could forgive him completely, but she was at least glad he wasn’t what he would’ve become had he gone back to the Carters. He wasn’t lawless or corrupt. He was principled and determined, and he devoted himself to hunting down and arresting criminals, when he would have been one himself if not for the choice he made in the attic of her old home all those years ago.
“I’ve thought about that night countless times,” she said, her breathing slightly off-kilter. Her heart thumped hard in her chest for some reason she couldn’t understand. “About the boy I stabbed and how, instead of hurting me back, he helped me.”
Jasper shifted, straightening his posture as he searched her face for any hint of what she might be feeling. He was wary, she presumed.
“I wondered if he’d regretted helping me,” she said. “I wondered if he ever thought of me afterward.”
They’d closed in on Westminster, entering traffic and the bustling streets of the city. But as Jasper held her stare, his own unwavering, Leo felt as if the rest of the world was barely there at all. The tip of her nose began to prickle, as did her eyes.
“I’ve never regretted it. Not once.” His brow tensed, then softened as his gaze drifted to her mouth. It lingered there a half second, if that, before lifting to meeting her eyes again. “And I have thought of you. Every day.”
She held her breath, the functioning of her lungs pausing. Under his heated stare, her pulse skipped unevenly. She didn’t know what to say or what he’d meant by those words. He’d thought of her every day? Even now? With a start, she suddenly realized how often she’d thought ofhim. And how much she didn’t wish for him to know it. Not yet, anyway.
Speechless, she drew in a long breath at last and lowered her attention to her hands, her fingers knitted together in her lap. For several more minutes, they rode in silence, allowing the noises of the city streets to carry them along. When Admiral Nelson’s statue in the center of Trafalgar Square appeared, Jasper banged a fist against the top of the cab. The driver pulled alongside the pavement and stopped.
“I imagine you need to go to the morgue,” Jasper said. She nodded.
Jasper descended, extending his hand to her. More than ever, Leo didn’t want to take it. But this time, it wasn’t out of anger or spite. It was because when she touched his hand, she expected to feel a strange coiling in the center of her chest. One that had everything to do with the way his heated gaze had just briefly touched on her lips.
She braced herself, took his hand, and stepped down. Then swiftly retracted her palm. “I’m going to see what more I can learn about Emma Bates.”
“Leo—”
“I’m not going to speak to her directly. Trust me, Jasper, I know better than to approach a murder suspect.”
He sealed his lips, biting back a certain retort. Maybe he only refrained because she’d addressed him asJasperrather than Inspector, as she had before. Jasper was who he was. Leo knew that now, even if the rest of it was still muddled and confusing.
“I’d worry less if you stayed out of it,” he said.
“I have to go,” she said, moving off. She’d been away from the morgue long enough. “Uncle Claude needs me.”
He grumbled under his breath, then climbed back into the cab, telling the driver to go to the Yard. She hurried through the rain to the front door of the morgue, pretending that parting company with him wasn’t a bit of a comedown.
She was grateful the lobby was empty, but as she shook the rain from her coat, a low murmur of voices could be heard in the postmortem room. Listening at the door, she recognized two voices: one belonged to her uncle. The other, to the deputy assistant coroner, Mr. Pritchard.
