Page 23 of Hunted in Hope Town

But she was frowning at him as if her own words didn’t make sense.

“Say something,” she ordered.

“I don’t know what to say.” Which was an uncomfortable truth he’d probably never admitted out loud before, but she kept poking at him, this woman who was only a ghost of his wife. Mixed with a woman he had spent the past two years pretending was just another mission. And something about that, the moment between just the two of them, her knowing too much already, broke some dam he’d been shoring up and maintaining for so long.

“You don’t owe me any sympathy. God knows everything that’s happened to you is all my fault, but I have spent the past two years in agony keeping myself just out of reach. And I managed because you needed it, because your safety and well-being demanded it, but I can’t manage if you insist on dredging up everything we were, because to me, we still are.”

She opened her mouth as if to speak, but damn, he couldn’t let her. He could not let her keep doing this to him. He had to keep her safe.

“So please, for the love of God, give me a damn break.”

Her eyes were bright with tears, but they didn’t fall, and she didn’t argue with him. She gave a little nod. “All right,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “That’s fair.”

“Nothing is fair,” he muttered, pain slicing through him at the fact he’d put those tears in her eyes, and more. So many more.

He turned on a heel and marched outside. Into the frigid cold of a snowy morning. For a moment, he let himself breathe in the sharp, icy air. Let it needle his exposed skin, his lungs. Then he pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed.

“I want to hear everything you’ve come up with,” Ellis demanded harshly to Zach’s, “Hello.” No small talk. No beating around the bush. He had to find his FBI mode again or he might just…lose it.

Zach’s pause was loud. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m great. Never damn better.”

“Ellis, we knew going in this might be complicated. It doesn’t have to be you—”

“Tell me.”

Zach sighed. “All right. Well, I don’t have anything concrete, but I’ll tell you my worst suspicions at the moment. I’ve got some concerns about Dr. Leigh.”

Chapter Nine

When Ellis went outside, Jessica let a few tears fall. Bottling them up didn’t do anything, particularly when there was no one in here to witness them. So she let them out, wiped them away, then marched back into the room he was staying in.

She stared at the wall. She wasn’t going to wait around for Zach and Ellis to handle everything. Maybe, in the end, they’d be the ones who figured everything out, who saved the day. Maybe that’s what former FBI agents did.

But that didn’t mean she didn’t get to try—to understand, to figure things out, to remember.

She poked around the little desk with a computer and printer, found a blank legal pad and a pen, and then pulled the chair over so she could sit in it and look at the wall.

It was mostly names, so she sought to put together a kind of timeline. An attempt to make sense of all this nonsense in her own head, in her own time.

He didn’t have the details of the actual night she was hurt up there, and she wanted them. Wanted to know how he’d been shot, since she’d clearly witnessed it if it haunted her dreams. Wanted to know the details of how she’d suffered a traumatic brain injury.

She closed her eyes for a moment, tried to picture it. She could see that dream vision of him, his bloody shirt torn. His face pale. Pain in his eyes. She could see that. No one could have put that in her head, and how could she have dreamed it up if it wasn’t something true that she’d experienced?

Which meant there were other memories inside of her, and maybe they were all that painful, but maybe the answer to all this was in her own mind somewhere.

She opened her eyes and glanced at the doorway. She didn’t jump or screech or even jolt. Somehow, even though he hadn’t made a peep, she’d known he’d be standing in the doorway staring at her. Like she’d lived this kind of moment a million times over.

She probably had.

She would say she didn’t know what love looked like, except she had spent two years existing in the world of Hope Town. She had been around Zach and his wife. She had been on the periphery of Lia entering into a relationship with Corporal Fairhurst. But it wasn’t just romantic love like that. It was Zach and Lucy with their kids. It was Lia with Corporal Fairhurst’s niece, who worked at the bakery. It was Albennie, Lia, and Franny Perkins and their little trio of friendship.

One born of knowing each other. She had spent the past two years seeing what love looked like in all sorts of scenarios, knowing she couldn’t partake because she didn’t know herself.

She saw it—hand in hand with misery—in Ellis’s changeable hazel eyes.

She worried she was fooling herself that something echoed inside of her. Like a memory of whatever love existed before her memory loss. She had no doubt she’d loved him, but she worried any feelings were just…wishful thinking. Wishful remembering.