Page 45 of You Know Why

“Wake up, baby. Wake up.”

Beep . . .

“Please, Brook. Please wake up.”

Beep . . . beep hiss . . .

“Remember what I said in Argentina, honey. Please remember.”

Beep . . .

“I love you forever, Brooklyn. Always.”

Beep . . . beep hiss . . .

Beep . . .

Beep . . . beep hiss . . .

Beep . . .

Watching her lying so still, he can barely catch his own breath. Can’t think. Can’t plan.

The kids, a small voice says, the voice that lives in his brain, the ghost of a woman he loved. You have to do this for them. This is how you protect them. Hurry.

If he’d gotten to the house ten minutes earlier, none of this would have happened. He wouldn’t have to leave without them. Wouldn’t have watched the ambulance pull away with his heart inside.

Damn it, he wants to stand in the door to his wife’s hospital room and roar at anyone who comes near. He wants to take the kids and run.

But neither of these options is practical. Nor remotely safe. He will do better on his own. He knows what he has to do. Find the men in the SUV and end them.

He already suspects they will follow the money. He will lead away from his family, away from his life. How they managed to get Eden involved is beyond him, but he’ll deal with her. She isn’t the immediate danger. Nuts, but not lethal.

Beep . . . beep hiss . . .

Hardest thing he’d ever done, though, walking out of the airport, leaving them behind. Second only to what he’s about to do now.

He pleads with Brooklyn once more, kisses her as gently as he can without disrupting the machines and setting off an alarm, then does the impossible.

He walks away.

No one in the hallway looks at him twice. He is wearing doctor’s scrubs he snatched from a laundry cart in the basement, the only way he could think to get into the hospital unmolested. He hasn’t looked in a mirror but assumes he’s got marks on his face from the fight, so he keeps his head down and face averted from the cameras. He makes it to the elevator unmolested. The doors slide closed, then open, and he is disgorged into the morass of the emergency department, then exits into the street.

He grits his teeth, the slap of cold night air bracing. Repeating the same words again and again.

Not this time.

Not this time.

He moves like smoke through the backstreets of Atlanta. It’s harder to do now with all the CCTV cameras, but he’s aware and practiced. The training never leaves you. You might get rusty, but the second you go operational, your senses sharpen and your entire perspective shifts. His time in the military taught him many things. How to hide. How to run. How to escape. Right now, he’s no better than an animal caught in a trap, desperate for freedom, to stay alive, not to be seen before he can make this right.

He doesn’t want to leave. But it’s the only way to keep them safe. It might be different if it were just Brooklyn; they’d managed for a long time, the two of them, moving from place to place, staying ahead of things. But the kids . . . He can’t put them in more danger. They’re safer at the house with cuckoo Eden and Detective Lee than on the run with him. A few more threads of his past are going to unravel, but it’s too late to worry about that now.

Looking back, he suspects they’ve been onto him for weeks. He was in denial for a while, thinking he’d pulled it off, that the money he was handing over would be enough to get them to back off. And when he realized it wasn’t, he thought slipping out of the country at the last second was going to work. He had the infrastructure in place to disappear. He’d been planning their escape for a few months. He knew the only chance they had was a sudden, complete break. Grab the kids, and Brooklyn, and run for it. Start over somewhere without extradition.

But now he can acknowledge he’s felt their unseen eyes, heard their unspoken threats. Seen all the moments they could end his life, or Brooklyn’s, or the kids’. They’ve done it before. They took Chloe from him, and they won’t hesitate to take Brook, too.

He can’t wrap his head around the idea that it’s happening again, that his world is being torn apart again. He spent months preparing for this moment, and he still wasn’t ready when it came.