Page 32 of Tracking Safety

“There had to be another way.” He shook his head. “There had to be something⁠—”

“I couldn’t take you away from your family. You had just lost Sarah. Your mother, your brothers and sisters—they were grieving. They needed you here.” She paused. “If you had disappeared too, with no explanation, no goodbye . . . it would have destroyed them.”

Luke opened his mouth then closed it again.

She wasn’t wrong. He knew she wasn’t wrong. His family had been wrecked by Sarah’s death and had spent months barely keeping themselves together.

Luke had been the one they leaned on, the one who showed up. If he’d vanished only a year later . . .

He pushed the thought away. It led somewhere he wasn’t ready to go.

“But the children.” The words came out rougher than he intended. He stopped. Then he tried again. “Your children.” His voice dropped to almost nothing. “Our children.”

“Our children would have become targets. They would have been hunted along with me. I couldn’t let that happen. I had to disappear before these people discovered my new life and made everyone I love pay the price.”

The anger he’d been holding onto all morning loosened at the edges, and something underneath it surfaced, something he hadn’t let himself feel in a very long time. His children had spent the last two years living with a hole in their hearts the shape of their mother. Liam had gone quiet. Cora had mostly stopped asking. Jonah had no idea what he was missing.

Jenna’s eyes filled with moisture. She didn’t look away from him. She let the tears come without trying to stop them.

Something about her crying, about the fact she wasn’t hiding her tears, showed him the toll this had taken on her.

The realization undid something in his chest.

“This wasn’t what I wanted.” Her voice broke on the last word. “Not for a single day. But I’m their mother. My job is to keep them safe. Even when keeping them safe meant . . . even when it meant leaving. Better a broken heart than a broken body.”

Part of Luke wanted to think this was a joke.

Jenna’s story sounded unlikely and larger than life. It sounded like the kind of thing that happened in movies, not here in Small Town, Virginia. But deep down he knew this could really be true.

This was the woman he’d met at a fundraiser in Charlottesville, the one he’d spent three months wearing down until she finally agreed to have dinner with him.

He looked into her eyes and knew she was telling the truth.

However, he had no idea what to do with that knowledge.

Jenna watched Luke sit with everything she’d told him and wished she could read his expression the way she used to.

At one time, she’d been fluent in Luke King. Her time away had cost her that too.

He looked up finally. “Why now? Why come back now, after two years?”

She swallowed hard before saying. “Because Roderick is dead.”

Something shifted in his expression. “What?”

“He was shot three months ago. The marshals contacted me. Told me the threat had been neutralized. I was no longer in danger. Between Roderick’s death and his father’s dementia, the organization had fallen apart. I was . . . well, I was free.”

He blinked. “So you came back.”

“Not right away. I didn’t know how to come back. I didn’t know if I even had the right to come back.” She paused to gather her thoughts. “I wasn’t sure how you’d feel. Whether you’d want to see me at all. Whether it would only make things worse for you and the children to have me show up after everything.”

He said nothing for a long moment.

She’d wondered, during those two long years, whether he had moved on. When she was free to return, she wondered whether she would arrive in Blue Ridge Hollow to find someone else in her place—a woman who made Luke’s coffee in the morning and helped Cora with her hair and knew all the things about him Jenna had once known.

So for a month, she’d watched from a distance, and she’d seen that he hadn’t found someone to replace her. That he’d been carrying all this heartache alone.

That knowledge had brought her both relief and a grief she hadn’t expected.