Page 9 of Running to You

Sam looked at it but didn’t pick it up. He didn’t need to. He knew what it was. “Where’d you get that?” His voice, too loud before, was now unnaturally low.

“It was in her hand. I found it when I examined her wrist.”

The business card was crumpled and worn, as if she’d held onto it for a long time. It explained one question Sam had yet to vocalize—how she’d found him.

“You gave that to her in Salt Lake City, right?”

Sam’s gaze snapped up. “How did you know that?”

“When Camilla and I went to dinner that night, we saw you talking to a woman. You wrote something down and gave it to her. Your address, apparently.”

Sam’s hasty scrawl was smeared in blue.

“You looked…” Dan shrugged. “I would say worried, but I couldn’t see your face, just your body language. I thought you’d tell us about it, but you never did. I forgot about it until I saw the card in her hand.”

Sam didn’t like that his brother had seen. He didn’t like that he had to explain himself. He didn’t like any of this. He wanted to tell Daniel to mind his own business.

But Eliza was Daniel’s business now. He’d examined her, after all. He was concerned for her health. And he was Sam’s big brother. He could be trusted.

“After we broke up, she disappeared. She blocked my number.”

“Did you deserve that?”

“Probably.”

He wasn’t about to share the details. He would have tried to win her back if she’d given him any opportunity. But she didn’t want to hear from him. She didn’t care enough to listen.

“The point is, she didn’t just disappear from my life. She disappeared completely. Quit her job. Moved out of her place. She blocked me on social media, but I’m still in contact with her mother and some of her friends. I’ll admit, for a while”—the first two years, but Daniel didn’t need specifics—“I looked for her. Photos, mentions of her on other people’s pages.” He’d even hired a PI, though he didn’t want to sound too pathetic. “I wanted to know she was okay. I mean, we were together for a long time, and then… There was nothing. Not a single mention of her. No photographs. Nothing.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I have no idea.” There went his volume again. He tamped it down. “That’s why, when I saw her in Utah… It’s not that I wanted her back. I just wanted to know she was all right. But I got the opposite sense. I thought she looked scared, like she was afraid somebody might see us talking. The way she acted—”

“I know what you mean. She looked nervous.”

As much as he hated knowing his brother had witnessed him practically begging her to talk to him, he was glad to have his impression confirmed.

“Did she tell you anything?”

“Nothing. And she never contacted me.” That had told him everything he needed to know. Not that he’d dreamed they’d reconcile, marry, and live happily ever after. But the way she’d so thoroughly cut him out of her life as if he hadn’t mattered…and then rejected him that day in Salt Lake six months before. It had hurt.

And yet there was the business card he’d given her, its hard edges softened and curling. She hadn’t tossed it away. Maybe she hadn’t completely tossed him away.

“You loved her.” Daniel’s words held no question.

Sam didn’t bother responding. He had loved her. But it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t enough.

And he wasn’t going there again. Only an idiot would restart a story he knew ended in tragedy. “We’ll take her to the hospital tomorrow.”

If Daniel was surprised by the subject shift, he didn’t let on. “You told her you wouldn’t take her if she didn’t want to go. And she definitely doesn’t want to go.”

“Something happened to her. Somebody needs to figure out what. If not the hospital, then the police. She must’ve been in some kind of accident, right? For all we know, somebody’s looking for her.”

“The people in the white pickup know where she is.”

“That kid? He couldn't squeal out of here fast enough.”

Who would do that? Who would dump an injured woman with no memories and not even walk her to the door? A stupid teenager, but still…