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Twenty-Three
I COULDN’T EVENmuster the energy to pretend to jog back to the house. I just walked, all slouchy—protesting every disappointment in my life with bad posture.
Jack met me on the gravel road in his newly switched-out Range Rover.
“Saw the news,” he said. “Let’s go to the river.”
“Okay,” I said with a limp shrug, and climbed up to the passenger seat.
We didn’t talk on the drive down. I just watched the scenery with that slowed-down awareness that comes when you’ll never see something again. The barbed-wire fences. The rutted gravel lane. The grass fluttering in the fields. The tall pecan trees brushing the sky. The buzzards circling lazily overhead.
It was like no place I’d ever been—or would be again.
I was never emotional to end a job. That was part of not getting attached. You were just working. When you left, you’d be working somewhere else.
I didn’t know what to do with the sadness that was soaking into my heart. It felt so full, I could wring it out like a sponge. What did people do with sadness like this? How did they dry it out?
When we got to the end of the road—to the same place where Jack had given me that piggyback ride back at the start—Jack cut the engine, but neither of us got out.
I explained everything to him, and what it all meant, and why we had to do all the things we now had to do.
He tried to argue with me. “I don’t want Bobby to replace you.”
“He’s not replacing me. He’s not going to, like, sleep on your floor in a white nightgown.”
“Thank God.”
“It’ll be a whole different deal because there’s no more pretending. He’ll just stand around, secret-service style.”
“That might be worse.”
“It will be,” I said.
“I get why we have to tell my parents, and I get why we need to step everything up. But I think you should stay.”
“I should stay?”
“Stay with me and be protected.”
“By my own company?”
“You’re in danger now.”
“That’s not how it works. I’m only in danger because I’m near you. Once I leave, the threat level’s totally different.”
Jack thought about it, then argued some more, then finally gave in. Our whole meticulous setup felled by a homicidal part-time corgi breeder.
“So this is our last day together,” Jack said, when he’d run out of ways to argue.
“Yep. I’m leaving after dinner.”
“After dinner? That feels fast.”
“The faster, the better.”
“And then—I won’t see you after that?”
“Nope.”
