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“No kidding.” She swallowed the last of the bottle and set it down on the wide windowsill to free her hands. “I started thinking that what happened between us while we were there was some kind of one-off. Like an echo from the past. That reality,” she dragged in a deep breath and let it out again, “had turned on its head and once you were back home, packing up, you’d… come to your senses.”
Crazy.
She’d just put into words the uncertain feeling he’d had inside since they’d parted ways at the training camp.
“I guess what I was thinking while I was packing up my stuff in Norfolk was how I kept trying to figure out what parts of you were you and what parts of you were just your cover. I know what I saw in Wyoming and so much of it just felt the same.
“The way we just got along from day one. I went back through and tried to figure out how much of you is… you. And how much of who I knew back then was real, flesh and blood, or someone you were trying to be to get to know me.”
Cygny wrapped her arms around her legs and touched her chin to her knee, her eyes drifted down to stare at the floor by his foot.
When she looked back up, fixed her gaze to his, he felt like he was looking straight into her soul. The pain and devastation he saw in her eyes made his chest ache.
“I was always that person,” she started to explain. “You weren’t even on my list of people to investigate. The whole list that I was given was from the administration offices on base. People who had direct access to the kinds of information that was finding its way into enemy hands.
“You were the guy living across the way.”
She filled her lungs with air as if she was afraid it would be sucked out of the room a moment later.
“You were the guy I couldn’t believe was paying attention to me. Even when I was awkward and I know I was awkward a lot, you didn’t seem to mind. In fact, you seemed to enjoy my idiosyncrasies.”
His shoulders shook with laughter. “I did. You were unique.”
“And you,” she swallowed, “were a dream.”
He saw a tear gathering on her lashes and he moved closer on the couch, reaching out a hand to settle it on her knee. “You don’t have to say anything else.”
“No.” She lifted her hand and dashed away the tear, drawing in a deep breath that lifted her shoulders high. “You should know why. You should know how.”
Leo took a moment to study her face.
He really didn’t want to upset her. That rage had evaporated after their time in Wyoming. He was still hurt, but he didn’t believe at all that she’d done what she had to hurt him. Not in the way he’d initially thought.
“Okay,” he told her and settled back to listen, but he didn’t move his hand from her knee, “tell me.”
“My mother was a forger. Artwork. Painting mostly. In a pinch she could do some sculpting, but only if it didn’t have to be exact work. She could paint like Picasso one day and Monet the next. We traveled around from city to city working her contact list for jobs where her friends, and I use that term loosely, needed a forgery of some sort.”
“Forgeries? Like signatures?”
She shrugged, her head tipping to the side. “She did a fair amount of that too. And I was there with her. She never went somewhere unless I could go.”
“She loved you,” he ventured, “she wanted you with her.”
“Maybe, but after a while it felt like she was just lonely without me while she was painting. She always wanted to know what I thought. And being her daughter I knew what she wanted. She wanted praise. And during the day when she painted, I gave that to her.”
“And,” he wasn’t sure he should be asking a question and interrupting her, but he felt like he had to know, “what about at night?”
Her smile was soft and held a bit of sadness in it. “At night, she got attention from other sources. Men. They came to get her, and they’d be gone for hours.”
His hand gripped her knee, trying to comfort her. “That must have been scary.”
“I thought so,” she swallowed, and the sound seemed to echo from the walls, “until they started to stay in.”
His stomach twisted into a knot as she continued to talk, her eyes fixed on his.
“We never had money enough to stay anywhere else but the cheapest place my mother could find. When they’d come to the door, she’d tell me to hide. The only place I could do that was the closet. I had to hide inside, sometimes behind a suitcase if we had one and put my hands over my ears.”
She went quiet for a moment and started to rock back and forth.
Leo moved closer and moved his hand from her knee to her upper arm, rubbing it gently for warmth. “Did that work well enough?”
Her throat worked reflexively. “Sometimes.”
He rubbed her arm watching for signs that his touch might be too much.
“Sometimes I had to sing.” She swallowed again and her next breath pulled into her lungs on a gasp. “Softly so they couldn’t hear. A song I remembered from when I got to go to school.”
“The song with the states, right?”
She looked back at him with shock written plainly on her features. “How did you-”
“I heard you that last day. I remembered the song from school as well. I was going to tell you that we had that in common, but by the time I walked out of the bathroom, you were gone.”
“I’d just found something on your laptop. While you were in the bathroom something dinged a notification on your screen. You mentioned wanting to take me out to dinner instead of just staying in, but you wouldn’t tell me where and I thought… What if I don’t have a nice enough outfit to go? So I thought the ping was for a reservation reminder? Instead, it was an email with instructions for a file transfer system.
“A highly secured file transfer system.”
She held his gaze and spoke softly, as if she couldn’t bear to say it any louder.
“I tagged it and added coding into your browser that would cache your correspondence and sent it to my secure server.” Cygny took in a slow, measured breath. “And then I left. I couldn’t bear to look at you and wonder, but I kept asking myself. What had I done? What was I going to do? That’s where I made my biggest mistake. I got back to my place and dug into that email, the past messages. The further in I went the more down the rabbit hole I descended.
“Then it was all I could see or think about. And then my boss contacted me, demanding an update. I should have passed something on to him. Just some placeholder report, but I was all twisted up inside. My job and my heart had just collided together, blowing my world up in the process. And I sent him the report.
“And I told him I was done. That I couldn’t live that close to you and continue to go on. He didn’t like that, but he called me back to D.C. He stuck me in a room to analyze what I found. It’s all I did. It’s all I did for days, weeks even. Head down, burying myself in work so I wouldn’t have to think about what I’d left behind.
“Who I’d left behind.”
Her eyes welled with tears, and he started to draw her closer, but she held back. She stayed where she was so she could look into his eyes.
He felt his heart pound painfully against his ribs.
“When I’d finally reached bottom, I was exhausted. I compiled everything believing that I had somehow destroyed your life as you’d shaken my trust. I went to see my boss and turned it in. Hundreds of pages of documents, transfers, evidence.
“When I was at his door, I heard him inside, laughing to someone on the phone. Maybe he’d gotten so full of himself that he didn’t think I’d have the wherewithal to listen into his conversation. He said that he’d finally found the Achilles heel in your unit. He told them he’d have you twisting in the wind and your balls in a vice and then he’d turn you like he’d done before.”
“Turn me.” The words sounded flat as they fell between them.
“That’s when I went back to my desk, put all of the files on a disc and took it home.
He was shocked, even more than he had been just a moment before. “But that’s-”
“Illegal? Maybe even a little traitorous? Absolutely, but I needed time to think. I needed time and distance to understand what was happening. And I needed the pieces of what was left of my sanity to fall into place.
“When that happened, I didn’t know why he’d done what he did. My director had decided to work for the enemy. He was determined to bring down one of the most dedicated SEAL units in the Navy. And he had used me to get to you.”
“Cygny, you don’t need to say any more.”
