Page 36 of Hunted in Hope Town

She didn’t try to push, just let herself settle in her body like Dr. Leigh was always telling her to do. The unsteady rhythm of her heart. The way his mouth had felt on hers. The heat of his rough palms and the way brown and green dappled in his eyes like they couldn’t quite decide what direction to go in.

She knew those eyes. If they had been together so long, she had to know them, deep at the center of something. Maybe in that yearning feeling at the center of her chest, reaching out for something from him.

Him. No tension. No pain. Just him. Smiling. Relaxed. It didn’t come to her in a flash, so much as the wispy vision of something just out of reach.

“There was a place…with a balcony overlooking a beach.” She could see it. She could see him, the blue of it all behind him. “The ocean.”

By the way his muscles tensed, she knew it was a real thing. Not just hope.

“Did we live by the ocean ever?” she asked him, searching his eyes for the answer.

“No,” he said, and his voice was rough. Pained.

But there was something. “Tell me.”

“We went to Hawaii for our honeymoon. The only nice vacation I ever took you on. No work. No… Just us. And a balcony. Overlooking the ocean.”

She couldn’t remember it, not like she could remember, say, her first day working at the bookstore or last year’s Christmas party. But there were impressions of moments. The sound of the waves. The simple, settled joy she’d felt with him on that balcony. Dancing. Laughter.

A feeling she only knew how to label as love.

She didn’t let him go. She stayed there, on the fringe of a moment that would have been so many years ago. She wasn’t crazy, she wasn’t projecting, she could feel the love in those moments. She could feel the things she’d felt, even if she couldn’t remember every second of every day.

She opened her mouth to explain that to him, or try, but he beat her to it. That pain he used like a weapon throbbing in his voice.

“I never stopped loving you, Kirsten. But I’m not sure, when you remember, you’ll be able to say the same. I’m telling you that so you understand that it’s not going to be so easy to remember, and whatever good you think you know, it wasn’t all good.”

And there was the answer, this…thing he kept alluding to without coming out and saying it. That things had not been okay between them. He’d left—and he insisted it hadn’t been because he was afraid to be a father, but that was sure stuck in her mind.

His phone chimed. Immediately he moved away, even though she tried to firm her grip on his hands. “It’s Zach. I have to take this.”

She felt the familiar wave of something. Frustration. She didn’t fight it. She let it wash over her. “You always felt like work was more important.”

His eyes cooled. Pain shuttered behind a thick impenetrable wall. “People’s lives are at stake. Your life is at stake. So yeah, this is more important.” He turned away from her, brought the phone to his ear, and walked out the front door.

Kirsten stood where she was, remembering being left exactly here too many times to count.

And wondering why the hell she’d accepted it.

“DR. LEIGH IS CLEAN,” Ellis said when he answered, without any preamble.

He had no preamble. He felt like he’d been wrung into a hundred knots he’d never untangle. Everything inside of him ached. Physically. Emotionally.

Zach’s silence on the other line stretched out. “You sure?”

Was he? “There was absolutely nothing in the session to lead me to believe she’d purposefully leak information to someone who would cause Kirsten harm. Everything she did was the act of…a therapist who wants her client to be okay.” More like clients, because she had asked him how he was feeling. She had lumped him in with everything.

Like she was telling the truth and she’d only been keeping him on the sidelines until Kirsten was ready to deal with remembering.

“So, it’s interesting you use the word purposeful,” Zach said, and Ellis didn’t think he was imagining the dark tone. “I went back over my initial investigation into Dr. Leigh before we used her, and when we started, she didn’t have an assistant.”

“She has an assistant?” He’d never met one or dealt with one or heard about one.

“Apparently. You didn’t know?”

“No, but I haven’t been to the office in a while. Kirsten… Jessica had only been going to her office once a month lately. I’ll have to ask if she knew about an assistant. Met her. Do you have information?”

“I’m working on it. Because it’s pretty damn fishy that this assistant we didn’t know about leaves Dr. Leigh’s office the minute your video conversation is over.”