Chapter Six
My wife.
Jessica turned away from him. She couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t… It felt like something had pierced her through the chest. A kind of pain that echoed out to the rest of her, especially at her temples. She felt a bit like she was going to throw up.
My wife.
“Jess… Kir… I don’t know what to do here. Dr. Leigh said it was best if you remembered on your own.” He sounded pained. Lost.
But not nearly as pained and lost as she felt. Still, there were things she remembered, apparently. “I remember you being shot.”
“You said it was a dream.”
“It was, but it was real. You’ve been shot exactly there.
” And there were other things. Little things.
Over the past two years, he’d always felt different than everyone else.
Those strange impulses to reach out and touch him.
The reticence to be around him and yet it had never been fear.
Even in the discomfort, it had been something like…
Knowing there was a secret but not knowing what it was. Not wanting to know.
Now she knew. And still nothing made sense. Ellis wasn’t a stranger, but she could stand here and look at him and remember nothing that came before except a bloody shoulder. And maybe a few other things she’d gotten in the habit of convincing herself were her imagination.
Him smiling in a tuxedo, like at a wedding. Him with a beard, talking to her in low, serious tones while her heart ached. A dichotomy of feelings, leaving too many questions swirling around in her head.
Were we happy? Do you love me? Am I supposed to love you? But that was all… Those were things they could circle back to, and they didn’t have anything to do with the threat.
“So, this envelope was addressed to me, and that’s a threat on my life because…?”
He took a deep breath. She could see the pain in his expression, but none of it echoed in his voice.
He spoke like she’d expect any law enforcement agent to speak.
Stoic and to the point. “No one is supposed to know we’re in Wyoming, let alone Hope Town.
They’re certainly not supposed to know Jessica Smith’s real name is… Mrs. Sutton.”
“And it couldn’t be a…misunderstanding?” she asked, but even as she said the words she knew they were stupid.
Of course there was no misunderstanding. Maybe Ellis was always there, but it’s not like he acted like a husband. It’s not like anyone acted like he was her husband.
Something cold stopped her. Did everyone know except her?
She shook her head against that horrible question. No. Maybe some people knew, like Zach, but she didn’t think many. Albennie and the rest wouldn’t have teased her about Ellis if they…knew. They were her friends. They were…
Threat, Jessica, there is a threat against you. Focus.
Except she wasn’t Jessica. She was Kirsten Sutton. Mrs. Kirsten Sutton. Married to…
“So, you were in the FBI and I was your wife?” Even though it made her heart jump to say it, there was something anchoring and steadying about knowing this truth, even if she didn’t remember it.
If she could work through the facts, maybe it would start to make sense.
She had to hold on to facts, not feelings.
“Yes,” Ellis agreed. “I had been working undercover. With a mob group. They discovered my true identity, threatened you. Hurt you. That was the night I was shot. You suffered a brain injury.”
She lifted a hand to her head, where it hurt. That part was a complete blank to her. All she remembered was the blood on his shoulder. Nothing about herself.
“But…backup arrived, and we managed to put a few of them away with what evidence I’d collected. A few of them wiggled out of it. Putting us both in danger. Making us both a target.”
“A target. Of the mob.” Sure, that was just…a normal thing to accept. Her life for two years had been this little peaceful town and a bookstore, and all along she’d been a married woman and a target of the mob.
“So you’ve just lived…here. Watching me? I don’t understand.” Except it explained…him. Always being just there. Never getting too close.
Or too far.
“I couldn’t… Maybe I should have just let you go into WitSec yourself.
But I couldn’t do it. It felt like I was…
abandoning you, somehow. So we went with a nontraditional witness protection where we could be together.
Maybe if things had been different, we could have done different kinds of therapy.
Second opinions. But we were both targets.
We had to disappear, and we couldn’t risk you talking with anyone about what had happened. ”
“So Dr. Leigh…knows about my past?”
“She’s a retired psychiatrist who worked with the FBI previously, now does some freelance work, usually with former law enforcement dealing with PTSD.
She doesn’t have all the case details, but she knows what happened to you.
You had to have someone, something, but she was the only one I could trust. I probably wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for Zach. ”
“How does Zach connect to all this?”
“We had a mutual friend from his days in the Bureau. That friend suggested I contact Zach. I explained the situation, and Zach said Hope Town could accommodate our…whole thing.”
It connected to what Faith had said, the sense of community that she’d felt. Women, targets. All of them. Witness protection. Probably why no one pressed about her past. Why there weren’t questions or curiosities. Everyone in her orbit was in a similar situation, hiding from who they were.
Of course, she didn’t remember who she was. She sat with a thud on the couch, feeling wrung out. Exhausted. But this man stood in front of her. Mrs. Kirsten Elizabeth Sutton. That was her name.
She eyed the man who’d delivered that so stoically…but there was nothing stoic in his hazel eyes.
“You’re my husband,” she said.
“Yes.”
She looked up at him and couldn’t ignore all the other types of questions swirling in her mind. That had nothing to do with danger and everything to do with him. “Do we love each other?”
I HAVE LOVED you every second of every day since I laid eyes on you. He could hardly say that to her. Even if it was true.
“I understand that you want to work through this, but Dr. Leigh really felt like—”
“Dr. Leigh isn’t here. It’s you and me. We were married. Was it a good marriage? Did we love each other? You’re here—you’ve been by my side without being by my side for two years. I need to understand the context of that.”
She had every right to know, but he was afraid to tell her anything. Afraid of going against the doctor’s orders. Afraid, period. Because she didn’t remember, and what might be changed, altered, broken or worse by what he chose to share?
So he hedged. Something he’d had to learn how to do these past two years, because prior to this circle of hell, he had never hedged. Always known. Always moved forward, one certain step at a time.
He needed to find that old person again if he was going to keep her safe, but there were careful land mines to skirt around first.
“I don’t know that I… I can answer on your behalf.”
“Surely you know if your wife loved you or not.”
You’d think. But it wasn’t all that last fraught year. “We did. Love each other. We’d been married about ten years. Together fifteen.”
“But no…kids?”
Even not remembering, that would be a topic. “No. Not…yet.”
“There’s a million things you’re not telling me,” she said flatly.
“It’s fifteen years to wade through.” And as much as he’d wanted to wade through it with her, he had spent the last two being told not to do anything that might disrupt her balance. Her healing.
This felt nothing but wrong, especially with a threat hanging over them.
She looked exhausted. Wrung clear out. She needed rest, not…this. And he needed to connect with Zach, see where everything stood.
“I’m not sure we need to get into all this. Dr. Leigh has always maintained it’s best to let you go along with what you do remember and not push what you don’t. When your brain heals, when you feel safe, she thinks you might remember some things.”
“But you know the answers. Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because you suffered a traumatic brain injury, K… Jessica.”
“Don’t…switch it up. Just call me… I’ll be Kirsten here. Maybe calling me by my real name will shake something loose. Maybe Dr. Leigh is wrong.”
God, how he wished that were true, but he’d always been told it was wishful thinking. Any desire to push was selfish. He needed to be what she needed, not what he wanted.
His phone trilled in his pocket. The display read Zach Simmons. “Let’s just table this for a minute.” He answered the phone and turned away from her. “Anything?”
“Morris didn’t notice anyone following her, and neither did anyone else. Whoever left that note wasn’t sticking around to see what the results of the threat were.”
“I want to know why they weren’t on the security footage dropping off the note.”
Zach paused, which was how Ellis knew it was bad news. “There was a bit of a glitch. Cam’s looking into seeing if it was…purposeful.”
“Come on, Zach. We know it was purposeful.”
“Yeah, probably, but we still have to make sure, and maybe that’ll give us an idea of where this is coming from.”
Maybe, but he doubted it. “I don’t need to tell you where to start looking.”
“No. But we want to be careful. If someone found you, they were looking. Probably for these past two years. And we don’t know who they used or threatened to get information very few people should know.”
Too many. Even he’d known that when he’d taken the deal. He’d made too many mistakes, thinking with his heart instead of his mind.
But he couldn’t fix that. He could only dedicate himself to the same cause he had for the past two years. Keeping Kirsten safe.
“I’ll do some basic digging into the people we know want to hurt you, see where they are. We’ll go from there. But for tonight, just…”
“Rest. Right. I’ll get right on it.”
“You’re safe up there, Ellis.” There was a pause. “How’s it going with Jessica?”
Ellis sighed, glanced over his shoulder in her direction.
She was scowling at his back.
“As good as it can be,” he muttered.
“Get some rest. I’ll touch base in the morning.”
“Yeah, sure. Thanks.” He ended the call, turned back to her and all that frustrated energy waving off of her.
She looked at him. Eyes serious. Mouth grim. “I remember that feeling,” she said very quietly. “Being pushed aside.”
“I never—”
But she held up a hand, just like she used to do when they were fighting. Ellis wasn’t a stranger to this, flashes of her old self in this strange new shell. There’d been a time when he’d filed every single one away as a sign.
He’d stopped. Had to stop. But now she knew.
And there was danger at their door.
“I do remember things. Maybe they’re jumbled, but I remembered you being shot. I remember…pieces.” She pushed to her feet. “I was remembering before…this.” She said that as if she was trying to convince herself. She probably was.
He wasn’t sure he believed her. Or maybe it was he so desperately wanted to believe her and he’d spent the past two years denying just about every single want.
Except being in her orbit. That he hadn’t been able to deny himself. Now, he realized he should have. A better man would have. Left her to real WitSec. Or left her, period. She deserved better.
But he couldn’t go back and be a better man—a lesson he’d learned the hard way two years ago. He could only go on and be the best man he could be in any given moment.
In this moment, he would do everything to keep her safe. To keep her whole. And once they’d identified and neutralized the threat, well, then they could deal with her knowing.
“If you get some rest, we can go over whatever you’d like in the morning.”
She studied him, suspicious and angry. “I’m going to hold you to that,” she said.
He wanted to laugh.
She sounded very much like his wife right then.