Page 51 of License to Kill

My first act as a free woman was to move from the apartment they assigned me, and I picked the cheapest part of town to make my home. Then, because I was an asshole determined to stay independent, I refused to give them my address unless I was given a guarantee nobody would visit me in person.

I was granted my request along with a promise all contact would remain by email and my address would be kept in a confidential file that required special permission to access.

It would do.

Unlike in Baltimore, there’d be no marked cars to help keep everyone in line, but I didn’t care. I had nothing to lose, nothing to gain, and if someone wanted to pick a fight with me, I’d be happy enough to oblige.

No one was stupid enough to bother me.

At least my former career in the FBI was useful for something; my resume landed me interviews at most places I applied to, and with my pension, I didn’t need to worry about money. I ultimately failed to avoid law enforcement, taking a secretarial job at a law firm. Thankfully, I would avoid court most of the time unless one of the lawyers required an extra pair of hands.

My job involved managing appointments and making travel arrangements for a team of ten attorneys. It offered me one thing the FBI never could: a fixed schedule.

I arrived at work at seven-thirty and left at five. If I needed to stay late or arrive early, I knew at least a week in advance. I got an hour for lunch, which I took at two every day. The novelty of knowing how every day of my life would go wore off within a week, and the numbness settled in again.

In my first month in New York City, I heard from no one, and I questioned why I checked the email address I’d been assigned. After the second, I stopped caring. I deleted my login information, got a new phone number, and opened a new bank account. My secretarial job paid for everything I needed.

In the large law firm, I disappeared in the crowd, able to limit my communications to the attorneys I managed, and most of them preferred to shoot me an email rather than waste their precious time talking to me. I was the only one in the office who wasn’t at least a paralegal, which suited me fine.

I could survive, but instead of alone in the woods, I’d be alone in the city.

Winter ended, spring came and went, and half a year of my life slipped away. History had a tendency to repeat itself, and while I recognized my descent into a holding pattern, I remained helpless to stop it. Unlike my last stint in New York, when I’d served as an anchor, I had nothing holding me in place.

There was no hope of being added back to an active roster. My days in the FBI were over, and I wondered what had become of the woman who had been so determined to make a difference.

Ah, right. She’d been shot by her ma.

The scars no longer hurt, but my heart did whenever I caught a glimpse of one of them in the mirror.

I thought about seeking out my pa’s grave. He couldn’t talk to me anymore, but I could tell him about everything that’d gone wrong. Maybe he could do what the psychologist had failed to accomplish. He would’ve told me to get my head out of my ass and get back to work, but he wouldn’t have cussed while doing it.

My slide took a turn for the worse at an office party; had I been paying more attention, I would have known it featured my arch-nemesis, pepperoni pizza. After the first slice, every memory I had suppressed haunted me, I made my excuses, and I retreated to the safety of my studio apartment, barren of anything beyond the necessities. If anyone came inside, there’d be no way of knowing who lived in the place.

Once upon a time, pictures of the life I had thrown away had decorated the walls, my trophies, belts, and medals from kickboxing had been tucked away in hidden corners where I could enjoy them without prying eyes knowing they were there. A bowl with my ammunition had waited by the door.

Nothing remained.

The ghosts of my past kept me company.

I locked the door, pressed my back to the wall, and slid to the floor. I choked back a sob, biting my knuckle in an effort to keep my tears at bay. The pain didn’t help.

Why was it I could last so long without a tear but a piece of pizza spelled my undoing? Everything about the party reminded me of Jake—of Jake before he had turned his back on me, when there had been no one else I wanted watching my back.

No one watched my back anymore, not even me; I tried not to think about who or what might be following me. I hadn’t been involved in kickboxing since my transfer into CARD. If someone attacked me, I doubted I’d present much of a challenge to them.

It would be better for everyone if I disappeared completely. Every day was the same. I woke up, I went through the motions, did what was expected of me at work, did more than what was expected from me at work to fill the time, came home, and slept. I ate enough to keep going, skirting the line between functional and too tired to think.

Even if I wanted to rebuild the bridges I had burned, the places I longed to return to no longer existed. The dead couldn’t come back to life, and everything worth living for had been buried in the ground with my pa.

I didn’t even know where my pa had been buried. Had they laid my ma to rest beside him, or had they put her elsewhere?

If I hadn’t been born, they’d still be alive. They would have adopted another child, a human one, one who wouldn’t have chased them from their Georgia home to Vermont. They would have filled their home with unwanted children and loved them without my existence sickening my ma, turning her into someone capable of killing my pa.

Nobody had told me the fate of the fosters, but I could only hope they’d been placed elsewhere before they’d been hurt, too.

Jake would have been free to find someone of his own kind—or at least someone who didn’t need what he couldn’t give me.

Why did I even bother? I curled beside my front door in an apartment devoid of life, and I questioned everything I had done, who I had been, and why I still insisted on going through the motions as though what I did mattered.