Page 74 of Forever Gone

The memory drew a smile.

Another followed.

Connor had been seventeen when a dare sent him across the football field during practice. He sprinted from the sideline in jeans and work boots, reached the quarterback as a play began, and tackled him before anyone understood what was happening. For one second, the entire field froze.

Then half the team chased Connor toward the parking lot.

Selena and Jessie watched from the bleachers, laughing so hard they could barely breathe. Connor cleared the fence near the equipment shed, lost one boot in the grass, and kept running without it.

He denied the story whenever Robert told it.

Those years had not felt precious while she lived through them. School had been something to escape. Elmsview had seemed too small, its roads too narrow, its people too interested in one another. Washington represented distance, importance, and the freedom to become someone no one here had already defined.

Selena rested both hands on the wheel.

How had she become this version of herself?

The answer existed in thousands of decisions that had once seemed temporary. College. Quantico. Assignments. Marriage. Divorce. Cases that ended and others that followed before the last one loosened its grip. Each year had arrived with enough urgency to feel separate from the life accumulating beneath it.

From the parking lot, high school seemed recent and impossibly distant.

Her father must feel that compression more sharply. Robert had watched his daughters become adults, leave home, return carrying anger towards each other, and spend years refusing to repair what had broken between them. All because Diane believed Selena had abandoned her to be their father’s carer when he was ill a few years ago. Selena had offered to pay to have him moved to Washington, D.C., but that just angered Diane even more. She accused Selena of never wanting to actually get her hands dirty and help.

She pictured her father in the padded chair near the rear window, waiting for Connor to make his next chess move.

Maybe time did not move faster with age. Maybe people only noticed its speed once more of it lay behind them than ahead.

The thought remained in the quiet car.

Selena lowered the window an inch. Cool air entered, bringing the distant sound of a truck on the county road and the dry whisper of leaves moving across the school grounds.

For several minutes, she did not think about Karen Sloane’s ruined mouth or Ruth Keller’s body beside the desk. Linda Mercer’s missing car and whatever had happened to her stayed beyond the parking lot. Boyd Cutler, Trina Vale, the school records, and tomorrow’s autopsy could wait there, too.

Instead, memory moved into less comfortable places.

Kelly Voss had controlled two years of Selena’s life inside that building.

A glimpse of Kelly at the end of a corridor had been enough to change Selena’s route. Laughter behind her could tighten every muscle in her back. Lunch periods became calculations about where to sit, which bathroom to use, and whether a friend would still speak to her after Kelly noticed.

Kelly had made her feel invisible when other people were present and painfully exposed when they were not.

Small.

Selena had hated that most.

Her father eventually intervened. Connor handled Rick Hanson in his own way. The bullying ended, and time carried everyone outward.

Now Kelly sat across from Selena in briefing rooms, entered scenes beside her, and wrote reports under the same federal seal. They held the same credentials. They carried the same authority when they stepped through a door.

Equals.

The word should have settled something.

It did not.

Kelly had apologized. She had admitted what happened without hiding behind childhood or misunderstanding. At Boyd Cutler’s house, she had known when to press and when to hold back. Her instincts were good. The assignment could work if Selena allowed it.

That was the part she could not yet decide.