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Hannah, the woman I could have been killed trying to protect. The woman who was there when I woke up, who sat on my bed and poured her heart out. Hannah, my undercover wife who’d lain on that fancy bed and given me more pleasure than I’d known in years. The woman who continued to break through my shell, even when I dissuaded her at every turn.
“I would have thought you’d be rushing to leave.” My grandmother tilts her head.
“I did get shot, you know,” I quip drily.
She shakes her head, her sharp blue eyes—my mother’s eyes and my eyes—piercing through me. “I know not to take the joking answer as the truth.”
“I thought about not going back to New York at all. I could pick some place new and start over again.” At the time it had seemed logical, but now the words felt wrong. “But then what? I keep doing that every four or five years until I run out of places to go?”
“You tell me.”
Everything feels wrong now, all my old ideals and goals. All my old avoidance tactics. But the only thing that doesn’t feel wrong—staying here and trying with Hannah, rebuilding my relationship with my grandmother—is fraught with risk.
“Why do you find it so easy to work in an environment where people shoot at you, yet the thought of having a meaningful conversation has you running away like a terrified animal?” Her question isn’t sugar-coated at all, because that’s not how my grandmother plays.
“Because I’m not scared of death.” The words pop out of my mouth before I can even consider them, and I know it’s my deepest truth. “I’m scared of surviving.”
“Hmm.” She leans back in her chair and crosses her arms over her chest.
If a little old lady could mic drop, then that’s what my grandmother just did.
I stand, slowly and painfully, curling into my injured side. This conversation has stirred up everything and I need to get away to think. If I’d really wanted to leave Australia, I would have booked my ticket on the hospital Wi-Fi. Because that’s how I am.
This revelation is making me question everything, and my grandmother’s words are swirling like a tornado in my head. The possibilities I’ve never allowed myself to consider are gathering steam. I’ve been changed by this experience—by living with Hannah, by getting shot. By this very conversation.
You’re alive, so start living.
“It would kill your mother to see you wasting your life.” My grandmother comes around the table and pulls me into a hug. “Don’t do that to her.”
“What if it’s too late?”
“It’s not.” Her head barely comes up to my chest and I look down at the curly grey hairs covering her head, and the tops of her shoulders covered in a thick, fluffy wool. She’s small and frail and I’ve almost made the mistake of wasting the years she has left. “And Owen?”
My throat is so clogged I can barely speak. “Yeah.”
“I forgive you. I hope you can forgive yourself.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Hannah
One month later...
IFINDMYSELFwalking along Clarendon Street in South Melbourne, heading in the direction of Love Street. It’s my day off and I’m utterly restless. My head’s been in a fog at work, and I’m stumbling over my words in meetings and missing basic things. It’s grief over losing Owen, and I need to distract myself. Instead, I’ve wound up here. I look up at 21 Love Street—at its chic, modern design and fancy glass-and-chrome entry.
Maybe I’ve come here to say goodbye. Who knows.
“Hannah?”
I turn at the sound of my name and see Drew striding toward me. She looks the same as she did the night of the barbeque—long platinum hair that swishes by her lower back, all-black outfit and a wicked glint in her silvery eyes.
“Oh, hi.” I struggle for what to say—how much do the people in this building know about who I really am? Do they know my marriage was a fake?
“I haven’t seen you around much.” She smiles and comes up beside me, her arms folded tight against her chest over the front of a studded leather jacket. “I wondered if you and that hunky husband of yours had moved out. But then I heard about the redecorating.”
“Redecorating?”
Drew looks at me a little strange. “Yeah, I bumped into Owen this morning and he was telling me about all the changes he’s making.”
