Chapter Forty-Two
Ethan
Turns out, if it’s dark enough, a cell phone flashlight can be surprisingly bright. Which was a good thing because the corridor
stretched farther than Ethan had first realized. And they’d been in there longer than he’d hoped. And the situation was more
perilous than he’d feared as he glanced over his shoulder at Maggie.
She had the back of his shirt in a death grip, but at least her breath was slow and steady. “You doing okay back there?”
“Yes. Why?” Her fingers twisted in his shirt and pressed into the small of his back.
“No reason.” He didn’t want her thinking about how long they’d been in that narrow space or that there wasn’t an obvious way
out.
“That’s not your no reason voice,” she shot back, which... good. He’d rather have her picking a fight than starting to panic.
“I know you don’t like the dark. Or tight spaces, that’s all.”
“Who said I was afraid of the dark and tight spaces?” She sounded like a woman who was very much afraid of the dark and tight spaces but wasn’t about to admit it.
“Nothing. No one. If you see a crack of light or something, let’s check it out. I’ll walk you back to the room and—”
“Who said?” Now she just sounded annoyed.
“You did,” he admitted.
“When?”
Oh no. Ethan had spent years avoiding this conversation, but he’d stumbled right into it. He felt a tug on his shirt, and it took
him a moment to realize it was because she’d stopped. She’d stopped but she hadn’t let go.
“If this is about Tucson—” she started.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about Tucson?”
“Oh.” She huffed. “We are not talking about Tucson.”
Ethan shouldn’t have been grateful for the darkness and the shadows, but he was. He didn’t want to face Maggie—see her. But,
more than anything, he didn’t want her to see him when he said, “It was a long time ago. You probably don’t remember”—he hoped she didn’t remember—“but we were in an elevator once. It wasn’t a big—”
“It was you.” There was wonder in her voice, like all this time, she’d thought she’d dreamed it. “At the Christmas party.
I got stuck in an elevator with... That was you.” He tried to pull away, keep walking, find someplace to hide, but it was
like she was seeing him for the first time, there in the dark. “I didn’t recognize you. Why didn’t I recognize you?”
Because he looked different. Because he was different. Her hand was a soft weight against his back and his scar and the skin he hadn’t felt in years, and something about
her touch soothed him. Burned him? He didn’t even know anymore.
“Ethan? That morning? On the plane...” Her voice was small and soft and he wanted to play dumb, blow it off, act like he
hadn’t heard her. “I saw your scar.”
He didn’t want to have that conversation—not then, not there, not ever. But he wanted to lie to her even less. So he settled
on “It’s not a cool story, Maggie. I didn’t leap in front of a bullet or—”
“I don’t want a cool story. You’re not Evan Knight, hitman-turned-bodyguard. I don’t want you to be. I just want to know...”
“You’re not going to let this go, are you?”
She laughed softly and said, “What do you think?” So Ethan turned and leaned against a wall that was little more than strips
of crumbling plaster.
“We have a place in the mountains. Wow.” He ran a hand over his face. “That makes me sound like a rich asshole. My father
is a defense contractor now, by the way, so he really is a rich asshole. He has a place outside Aspen. And it was Christmas...” He smiled in spite of himself because irony really
was a bitch. “I went because that’s what good sons do. And on Christmas Eve, I unwrapped a bottle of scotch I didn’t drink
and a bunch of ties I didn’t need and then I got the hell out of there.”
His eyes followed the dust as it danced in the flashlight’s beam. “I didn’t know the roads had gotten bad. Or” —he shook his
head— “maybe that’s a lie? Maybe I did know and I just didn’t care.”
“Oh, Ethan.” Maggie’s voice was so soft he barely heard her.
“I was halfway down the mountain when I saw them. A car had gone off the road and a pair of headlights were pointing straight
up, reflecting off the clouds, snow falling down through the beams. It looked like the Bat Signal or something. I remember
climbing down, but”—his laugh was dry and joyless—“the car was empty. I climbed down an icy cliff to be some kind of hero,
and the car was empty. The next thing I knew, the cliff gave out and... the last thing I remember is the sound. I woke
up in the hospital. I don’t know how long I was pinned or how I got out but...” He thought he might choke on the words.
“I am never going to forget that sound.”
“Oh, Ethan...” Her voice quivered and her lip shook. He wanted to still it with his own.
“For the record, the look on your face right now?” He brushed a thumb across her cheek. “That’s why I don’t talk about it
with strangers.”
“I’m so sorry.” Her eyes were too big and too wet and he hated that he’d made her weepy. “I’m so sorry I asked.”
Her hand was on his chest and Ethan held it against his pounding heart. “I’m not.”
“But—”
“You’re not a stranger.” He gave her hand a squeeze and felt her sway in the small space, lean against him in the dark.
“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. I’m—”
“Don’t be. When we met, I was coming off eight months of surgeries and four months of rehab. I’d stopped eating. I couldn’t
shave or comb my hair. I’d lost my job, and my friends had stopped taking my calls. It got so bad that, one night, I finally
opened that bottle of scotch. I got so drunk I... Never mind.” He pushed off the wall. They needed to keep walking.
“You got so drunk you...” She sounded so worried that he had to tell her—
“In my job we used to travel. Constantly. My team used to give me a hard time about all the books I read, so one day I started
writing this novel about a guy named Evan Knight. It was nothing. Just a way to kill time on a red-eye. It wasn’t even finished,
and it probably wasn’t very good, but what it lacked in quality I made up for in drunkenness, so I started querying literary
agents, chicken pecking with my left hand. I honestly thought I’d dreamed it until I started getting the rejections. Then
I got one that wasn’t a rejection and—” He gave a tired sigh. “That was Dead of Knight . I guess you know the rest.”
“Wow.” She sounded stunned. “I didn’t know it was possible to hate you even more.”
He would have been crushed if she hadn’t been smiling.
“So, yeah. That’s how I ended up at that party. And that’s why it’s okay if you didn’t recognize me. To be honest, looking
back, I don’t even recognize myself.”
Ethan started walking, pushing aside cobwebs and pointing out rotten boards. They were lost inside the narrow space and he
could feel Maggie—her gaze and her hand and her questions swirling like the dust and thick enough to choke on.
“Do you miss it? The Secret Service?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
“That’s... specific,” she teased. “Really eloquent. Very—”
“I’m not him anymore.” It wasn’t a snap. It was a confession. That’s what people never understood—that the reason Ethan didn’t talk about
his old life wasn’t because he was private. It was because his old life didn’t even feel like his. “I would miss it if I were
still that guy, but that was someone else’s life. I don’t... I can’t... Yesterday was the first time I’ve even touched
a gun in years.” Ethan shook his head, but didn’t look back. He never looked back.
“What?” She gasped. “Ethan? Slow down. Ethan.” She gripped his shirt again, stopping him. “What happened?”
Maggie was a world-class writer. Of course she knew there was more to the story. But that didn’t mean he had to tell her.
He could always lie. Evade. Flirt. With anyone else, he would have. But with Maggie...
“I did the surgeries and the rehab, but...” He held his right hand in the beam of the light and—at the end of the corridor—the
shadow shook. Because his hand shook. Because his hand would always shake—always for the rest of his life. “See that? That tremor?”
“Not really.”
“It’s there. Trust me.” He gripped his hand so tightly his fingernails left half-moon indentions on his palms. Scars that
only he could see. “It’s always there.”
They were silent for a long time, lost inside the dancing dust and swirling secrets, so he wasn’t expecting the question—
“Do you have kids?”
His laugh was sharp and too loud in the stillness. “What?” He started walking again.
“Don’t laugh. It’s just... you were so good with the baby, I wondered...”
“No. No kids. But I do have four brothers and four sisters-in-law—who send me annoying texts when they find out I’m skipping
Christmas, by the way.” He gave her a look and heard her laugh. “And nieces and nephews. So many nieces and nephews.”
“How many?”
“Seven. No, twelve. Maybe eighteen? I don’t know. They keep popping them out.”
“You sound very attentive. Involved.”
“Hey. I give piggyback rides and buy candy. Those little monsters love me.”
Eventually, they reached a set of stairs that spiraled down into a space that looked even tighter and darker, so he tried
to usher Maggie back in the opposite direction.
“Okay. Let’s turn around and—”
“No. Don’t you want to know what’s down there?”
“You don’t have to go,” he said simply.
“I’m not scared.” She tried the top step. It creaked beneath her weight but didn’t break. And then the look in her eyes slayed
him. “I’m with you.”
At the bottom of the stairs, the floor was dirt and the ceiling was lower and Ethan knew without being told that they were
underground. He needed to get her out of there. But Maggie was right behind him. And when he took her hand in his, it didn’t
shake at all.