Chapter 38
THIRTY-EIGHT
THREE WEEKS LATER
Jessica folded the last of her clothes and tucked them into the suitcase.
It was brand new—bought especially for the move.
Her old one had vanished somewhere on that lonely Mississippi highway, lost for good.
She didn’t miss it. If anything, it felt like a fitting metaphor: leaving the past behind, untethering herself from the weight of everything she’d been carrying.
And she was leaving behind more than just a battered old suitcase.
She glanced around her bedroom, taking in the empty spaces where her life had once been.
When she’d finally been discharged from the hospital and cleared by the alphabet soup of agencies that had pried into every corner of her existence, she’d booked the first flight back to the sun-drenched familiarity of Florida.
But the moment she arrived in Panama City Beach, reality hit hard.
Her house, still wrapped in crime scene tape, stood like a monument to everything she had endured. Inside, the wreckage remained untouched—clothes scattered, furniture overturned, food all over the floor. The air still felt thick with the ghost of that night.
For three days, she had sifted through the mess, tossing what was unsalvageable into a skip bin, boxing up the rest for long-term storage. Now, all that remained was a single suitcase, overstuffed with the last remnants of her life.
She had gotten good at this—packing up, starting over.
Practice makes perfect.
She zipped it up and grabbed the handle, ready to drag it off the bed. Then she froze. There was someone standing in her bedroom doorway.
Heart pounding, she turned to face the intruder. When she saw who it was, she exhaled, her pulse slowing but not quite returning to normal.
He looked very different from the last time she’d seen him in that doorway. When he’d worn a chromium star on his belt and a Glock on his hip. Now he lacked both, though she doubted he was unarmed.
Because he wasn’t a deputy U.S. marshal any longer. Now he was Ryan Inglis, a wanted fugitive.
He was wearing jeans and sneakers and a dark blue hoodie. The casual clothes seemed out of character. Whenever she thought about him—and she was embarrassed to admit that she had thought about him—it was always in a crisp white shirt, with his hair neatly combed.
Then she reminded herself that she didn’t really know him at all. She never had.
He looked tired, and he hadn’t shaved in about a week. Somehow, the dark circles and the golden scruff on his jaw made him look more attractive. Less boy-next-door and more ruggedly handsome. Life on the run apparently suited him.
He glanced at the wall over her bed, where she’d attempted to scrub the spray-paint off. It had taken two bottles of turpentine and cost her all her acrylic nails on one hand, but she’d faded it to a faint mark.
Neither of them spoke; they just stared at each other. Finally, she ended the standoff. “There are a lot of people out there looking for you.”
He broke eye contact with her but said nothing.
“I heard every U.S. marshal in the country has joined the hunt. I heard they set up a special task force just for you.”
His jaw worked, but still he remained silent.
“One of them could have been watching this house,” she said.
Finally, he spoke. “There wasn’t. I made sure.”
She put her hands on her hips and looked down at her bare mattress. “I hope you’re not here to apologize. Because that would be supremely inadequate.”
He didn’t answer. She looked up at him and raised her eyebrows.
He raked his hand through his hair, finally looking a bit more like the Ryan she remembered. “I came to see if you were okay.”
She gave a dry laugh. “I’m alive. Okay would be pushing it.”
He was looking at her, and she could feel his eyes taking in her still-bruised face. The swelling around her broken cheekbone was subsiding, but the dark purple and yellow hues of her two black eyes remained quite vivid.
“I heard what happened,” he said softly. “That you killed them. All three.”
She looked away, squeezing the handle of her suitcase.
“You did good.”
She glanced at him, her stomach twisting. She knew what she had to say to him, but making the words leave her mouth took a tremendous effort. “Ryan, your wife. Kylie.” She swallowed hard, then just forced them out. “She’s dead.”
The ball of his jaw tightened again, and he inhaled. When he looked at her, his expression was stoic. “I know. I found out on the news.” He looked down at his feet. “The guy on the phone, he told me they’d let her go if I gave them what they wanted.”
Me, she thought.
“And I got a text from her right after, saying she was sorry.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “I guess she never really sent that text. I guess she was probably already dead at that point.”
“I’m sorry.”
He looked at her, and his face suddenly crumpled. The stoic expression was replaced by a look so anguished, so despairing, that she desperately wanted to go to him and wrap her arms around him.
It took all her strength to stay where she was.
“I’m sorry, too,” he said, in a voice barely above a whisper. “For everything.”
She swallowed down a bubble of rising tears. Because she couldn’t trust herself to speak, she just nodded.
When she finally felt like she was on top of her emotions, she cleared her throat and said, “The FBI agent who took my statement told me she had a son. A little boy called Noah. He said they’d contacted Kylie’s mother, and that she was going to take him back to Tennessee to live with her.”
Ryan nodded. “Diane’s a good woman. She’ll take care of him.”
Jessica glanced down at her suitcase, then back at him. “The agent also told me you caught two flights and drove all day to get to me before they did. He said that there really is a safe house in Baton Rouge, and that you insisted on being the one to take me there, despite the hurricane warnings.”
She stared at his face, but he gave no reaction. “But if you think that somehow doing any of that somehow makes us square—”
“I don’t think that,” he interrupted softly.
“Good. Because it doesn’t. Not by a long shot.”
He looked down, and she couldn’t see his expression. Couldn’t see if her words had hurt him or snuffed out some hope he’d been clinging to.
She didn’t want to do either of those things. But she had to tell him the truth. No matter how much it pained her.
When he looked back up at her, his face was carefully neutral, and she was reminded how good he was at concealing himself behind that cool facade.
“Where will you go?” she asked.
He paused before answering, like he was still weighing his options. Or maybe weighing how much he could trust her with his answer. Finally, he said, “South.”
“Mexico?”
He didn’t reply. Just nodded at her suitcase. “What about you?”
She lifted it off the bed. “I guess I’ve realized running away isn’t the same as moving on. Sometimes you actually have to go back to move forward.” She turned to look at him. “So that’s what I’m doing.”
“You’re going back to Illinois?”
She shook her head. “San Francisco first. To see my sister. Then after that, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll enroll in that dance therapy course.”
He nodded and gave her a brief smile, like that genuinely made him happy. Then he reached his hand into the pocket of his hoodie and took something out. “Well, there’s one place you might want to consider going first.”
He held it out to her. It was a small piece of folded paper.
She stayed where she was and just stared at it. Then, when it became clear he wouldn’t come any further into the room, she crossed the space between them, reached out and took it from him.
When she unfolded it, she saw a handwritten name at the top and underneath, an address in Texas.
She looked up at him and gave a little shake of her head. “What is this?”
“His contact details,” he said softly.
She stared at him, searching his eyes with hers.
He exhaled, and she was close enough to him to feel it wash over her face. “Daniel Castano’s.”
Something brushed down her spine. Like fingertips, sending shivers all over her body. “But he’s dead,” she whispered.
Ryan shook his head. “He’s not. Neither is his brother Sebastián.”
She opened her mouth and tried to make it work. “What?”
“They both entered the witness security program roughly eleven years ago. Right after Daniel agreed to testify against members of La Mano Negra.”
She shook her head, not able to make any of this compute. “But he didn’t testify. He refused to cooperate with the DEA. He’d told me he’d rather die than become a snitch.”
“I guess something changed his mind. Because it was his testimony against Terry Bidois and the rest of his crew that brought the whole thing crashing down. He agreed to testify against Borya Sokolov, too, but that case was more complicated, and they couldn’t get an indictment.”
She continued to just stare at him, his words bouncing harmlessly off her brain. “But she told me he was dead. Belinda Weck, the DEA agent. She told me he got stabbed in prison. And Sebastián, she said he died after surgery.”
Ryan shook his head again. “Sebastián survived his surgery. Straight afterwards, he was taken to a neutral site in Chicago, along with his brother. After the trial, they were both relocated to Texas and given new identities.” He shrugged.
“I guess they told you they were both dead for your own protection. And for theirs.”
She was still reeling from the news, but it was finally sinking in. “How do you know all this?” she whispered.
“I got sent his whole file. It was all in there. The only stipulations he made before agreeing to the DOJ’s terms was that his brother be kept safe.” He paused, then added, “And he insisted that you be accepted into the program, too.”
She realized she was shaking all over and had to take a step back and sink down on the mattress. She looked back down at the piece of paper he’d given her. Ran her thumb over the handwritten address. In Texas.
She swallowed down a sudden uprising of tears. Then she glanced back up at him, realizing that this was why he was here. That he’d come all the way back to Florida, at huge personal risk, just to give her another man’s address.
It caused her heart to squeeze. “Ryan…” she whispered. She didn’t know how to continue that sentence. Didn’t know how to say both thank you and I’m sorry at the same time.
His eyes went to the ring on the chain around her neck. When his gaze met hers again, they were full of feeling. They contained sadness, pain, regret, and maybe even something like love.
They were two broken people who, for a heartbeat, had imagined that they could make each other whole again. And maybe they could have.
They’d never know now.
“Goodbye Jessica,” he said softly. Then he turned and walked away, down the hall and out the open front door.
She followed him and watched from her porch as he jogged across her yard, his hoodie pulled up over his head.
“Ryan,” she called after him.
He stopped and turned back to her.
“Jessica is not my real name.”
He nodded once, then kept jogging toward the road.
She watched him as he turned left, then rounded the bend and was gone.