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"Dr. Thorne," she said. "You're working late."

"Was the fire up here?"

"In the stairwell," Mikayla Johnson replied, a thirty-something nurse with dark hair and eyes, who was usually calm and unemotional but looked much more stressed tonight. "But it's all good. We had to move everyone from one side of the floor to the other. Thankfully, the east wing was good." She let out a breath. "What do you need?"

"I came to check on a patient, Jack Barrone. He came through the ER a few hours ago."

"Right," she said, clicking on the computer. "He's in room 408. We didn't have to move him. Dr. Morgan came up to check on him about thirty minutes ago. He was sleepy and confused but not combative. Unfortunately, he couldn't answer any questions without drifting back to sleep in mid-sentence. His CT scan came back clear. We're still waiting on toxicology. Dr. Morgan told us we could take off his restraints, which seemed to make him happy."

"Thanks. I'm just going to check on him."

She moved down the hall and entered the room, stopping abruptly when she saw the empty bed, the hospital gown on the floor, the blood pressure cuff on the pillow, and the IV catheter resting on the mattress beside a spot of blood. Her gaze flew to the bathroom door, but it was open, and he wasn't in there, either.

She ran into the hallway and then moved quickly back to the nurses' station. "He's gone," she said.

"What?" Mikayla asked in surprise. "Damn. His monitors stopped recording fifteen minutes ago. I didn’t notice. We were so busy."

She walked back down the hall and into the room with Mikayla. But there was no denying the truth. Jack Barrone was gone.

"I don't understand," Mikayla muttered, shaking her head. "He must have left when the alarms went off. Maybe he got scared or confused and thought he needed to leave. Tasha was working this wing. I was on the other side. I need to ask her if she talked to him or saw him leave. I'll be right back."

As Mikayla left, she looked around the room, wondering how Jack had had the energy to leave based on what Mikayla had told her about his level of exhaustion and confusion. But the alarms and strobe lights might have penetrated his foggy brain, perhaps triggering a fight-or-flight reaction. In his panic, he could have ripped out the IV and left.

She noted that his clothes were also gone, so he'd taken time to change out of his gown. That spoke more to purpose than to panic. Her gaze settled on a small scrap of paper on the floor, just under the bed. She picked it up. It was torn around the edges with only a name—Ty—and an address.

She had no idea if it had fallen out of Jack's clothes, but it seemed like a likely possibility. As she stared at the word Ty…her heart skipped a beat. Was it possible that Ty was referring to Tyler Brennan? It would make sense. Jack had served in the same unit as Tyler.

And what had he said earlier? That he needed to talk to someone he could trust. Was that Tyler?

Her pulse continued to race as old painful memories flooded through her. She'd actually met both Jack and Tyler five years earlier when all their lives had been very different. She'd barely known Jack then. Most of her interaction had been with Tyler and another man from his unit, Evan Cooper. Shaking her head, she tried to get rid of those negative thoughts. None of that mattered anymore.

In fact, when she'd first treated Jack in January, he hadn't even mentioned their previous meeting. He'd acted like he'd known nothing about what had happened, or he had chosen not to discuss it. Either way, she'd been happy not to discuss the past.

She looked up as Mikayla came back into the room.

"I spoke to Tasha," Mikayla said. "She never made it here. She got stopped by Mr. Kalinski, who was having a panic attack, and she was still with him when the alarms stopped." Mikayla paused. "Maybe check with security…I need to get back to work. The fire alarm upset a lot of our veterans who were triggered by the alarms and the lights."

"I understand. I'll check with security."

"I hope he's okay."

"Me, too."

She followed Mikayla out of the room, looking up and down the hall as she did so, but it was much quieter now. Most of the patients were back in their rooms, except for one man who was walking along the corridor in his hospital gown, pushing a walker, a nurse at his side.

As she went down the elevator, she couldn’t help thinking that the fire had given Jack a chance to escape, something he'd wanted to do since he'd been brought to the ER. His rambling, agitated words from earlier in the evening came back into her head. When Jack had realized where the EMTs had taken him, he'd been angry and also oddly fearful. He'd told her he couldn't trust her. He couldn't stay in the hospital. And she had no idea what was behind those thoughts.

Maybe it was whatever substance he'd been taking, but it felt like there was more to it than that. She wished she'd had a chance to check on him earlier than she had. She didn't have much self-doubt when it came to her patient care, because she was meticulous in her work. She never rushed. She never took a shortcut. She always tried to listen to the patient. But Jack had stopped coming to see her. Clearly, he hadn't believed she was capable of helping him, and tonight he'd looked horrible, and he'd blamed her for it, as if she'd missed something. Now he was gone, leaving behind a crinkled piece of paper with Tyler's address on it.

Now she wasn't just thinking about Jack Barrone; she was also thinking about Tyler Brennan.

Chapter Two

Tyler woke up Friday morning to a ringing doorbell. He rolled over in bed, squinting at the clock. It was seven a.m., and he hadn't gone to bed until three after finally wrapping up a month-long investigation that had led to the arrest of three members of a terror cell. He'd been looking forward to sleeping in for a few hours, but that wasn't going to happen.

As a pounding on the door followed the doorbell, he got out of bed, pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, then headed to the door. He threw it open, thinking it was one of his FBI team members, but it wasn't. And the strikingly pretty brunette standing on his porch with the pair of deep-blue eyes he'd never quite forgotten made his jaw drop. Her chin came up when she saw him, exactly the way it had in her office in Germany, right before she'd told him what she thought of him. Five years, and he still remembered the angle.

He rubbed his sleepy eyes, wondering if he'd somehow conjured her up. But she was still there, her gaze both wary and accusing, which was confusing. A lot of things had changed since they'd last seen each other. Maybe for her, too. She'd been wearing a uniform back then, but today she was dressed in body-hugging black slacks and a floral silk blouse. Realizing he was staring, he cleared his throat. "What the hell are you doing here, Rachel?"