Chapter Eight
After coffee and breakfast—a strange thing to do with another person, especially as natural as it all felt. And unnatural. And exhausting because the mental loop Jessica’s mind was running in never stopped—they went back into the little room with his…crime map wall or whatever.
She stared at the different dates, places, people. It was mostly gibberish. Chicago. A bunch of guys with the last name Caruso, or people with Agent in front of their names. There was nothing recognizable to her, not really.
She frowned because she’d at least kind of hoped that talking about this past she didn’t remember would jog memories after two years of being hidden from her past. She wanted it to be that simple, and even knowing it was foolish, she’d hoped.
But that hope was dashed because none of this made any sense. These men. Her husband. “So, these are the ones in jail,” she said, scanning the list. “Which one shot you?”
“He’s not on that list. The one who shot me is one of the ones who disappeared in the fray that night.”
“So, he’s on this list.” She turned her attention to the list of names of men who hadn’t been arrested or tried. “He’d be your top suspect, right? Come back to finish the job?”
Ellis shook his head. “He’s not on any list because he died last year.”
“Oh.” She huffed out a breath of frustration. “Well, so much for me being a genius investigator.”
He laughed, the sound warm and rich. She realized even in the past two years she didn’t have much memory of him laughing. Even the smiles he’d given her had been polite. Warm, but…not whatever this was that crinkled the skin around his eyes and warmed her from the inside out.
It felt like a coup to make him laugh, and she didn’t know if that was memory over it being a difficult endeavor or just the situation they were in.
“I’m leaning more toward the guys who were tried and weaseled their way out,” he said.
“I put them through more, and there’s no risk for them.
They’ve already been tried. The guys who disappeared?
If Caruso didn’t have them taken care of himself, it’d be a bigger risk for them to threaten me than to just keep laying low. ”
There were three names on that list. “But wouldn’t having been tried for something mean they know any retribution could come back to them?”
“That’s not really how the Caruso family works. They’ve gotten away with way more than I ever tagged them on. Besides, they could easily use lower hanging fruit to make the actual threats.”
Threats. She was trying to focus on that, on mobsters and danger, but her mind kept circling back to being married to this man.
“Why were you doing undercover work if it put me in danger?”
She watched him carefully in the silence that followed. He kept his gaze on the wall, but his jaw tensed. Everything about him tensed. And he took his time answering, like he was carefully weighing every word.
That too felt all too familiar.
“It wasn’t supposed to. It’s not like I was coming home at night. I was deep undercover. The only way they tracked me to you was if they had some kind of inside intel.”
“Like an inside person?”
“Possibly, or a way to infiltrate the system.”
“But they’d have to know…what they were looking for to infiltrate any system, right?”
“It depends. How much did they know about there being an investigation into them? And what access did they have to the people, the admin organizing that investigation? These are questions I’ve never been able to answer, and it’ll take too long to go back to the beginning when we have a threat here. Now.”
He probably knew what he was talking about, but it just felt all wrong. How could you figure out the end if you didn’t know the beginning?
But he knew the beginning. And the middle. He knew it all. And even when he answered her questions, she could feel all the things he wasn’t saying. Not that he was lying, but that every answer was so careful, so…vague.
He wasn’t lying. He was just keeping a big part of the picture obscured. Was it simply because her doctor had told him to? Or was it something more?
“Why would you go undercover, be away for an undetermined period of time, if you were married?” Was he trying to get away from her? He’d said they loved each other, but maybe that was some kind of…kindness. Trying to soften any blows for the poor amnesiac woman.
“It was an important case,” he said stiffly.
“Based on my record, my boss wanted me. It would have been a big gold star.” He shook his head, a kind of disgusted look on his face she didn’t understand.
“I wanted something big to end my undercover career on. It was a mistake, but in the moment, all I could see was glory right within my reach.”
“For what?”
He looked at her then, a frown drawing his mouth down and his eyebrows together. “What do you mean?”
“What’s the glory for?”
“I… Personal satisfaction. A positive note to end that part of my career on. I don’t know.”
“You weren’t trying to impress me?”
He laughed. Bitterly. “You weren’t impressed.”
She looked back at the wall. Something didn’t add up. “That doesn’t feel right. This is all very impressive.”
He shook his head. “Look—”
She held up a hand to stop him. “I know. I know. I don’t remember. I don’t know. But…why were you going to end your undercover career if it meant so much to you?”
He inhaled, a little sharply. Like she’d pressed on a wound. For a long silence she thought he wouldn’t answer. When he did, his voice was…strained.
“We were going to start a family.”
“Oh.” Well. That felt…so private and intimate.
She understood now, at least a little, why Dr. Leigh didn’t want her wading through this.
It wasn’t just uncomfortable to know she was this woman he’d been planning on starting a family with, it was a mix of other emotions.
Embarrassment and discomfort and confusion, along with the underlying and constant frustration she didn’t remember.
While questioning every errant thought and feeling—wondering if they were real or fiction.
But remembering would solve it all. She just needed to remember. “What did I do? For work.”
“You were an English teacher. You’d… You hadn’t renewed your teaching contract for the next school year because I was probably going to have to transfer once I retired from undercover work.”
“An English teacher.” She considered it, tried to find some memory in that knowledge.
“High school. That’s why Zach thought you’d be good at working at the bookstore.”
Okay, she supposed that felt right. Even not knowing anything about herself, books had made sense.
Stories and characters and themes. Book club night was the night she felt most…
comfortable, most real. Sure, not everyone talked about the books they’d read, but she usually got in a few topics before things skewed toward the other women’s personal lives.
But she didn’t remember anything about a classroom or students or what books she might have taught. The blank remained.
“You don’t have to push yourself,” Ellis said gently. “Zach and I are going to handle this threat. You’re safe. All you have to do is let us protect you.”
ELLIS STUDIED HER profile as she absorbed that. He wasn’t exactly expecting her to just say, yeah, okay, as much as he’d like her to.
But he didn’t understand why she looked angry.
She turned on him, dark eyes flashing with temper. A temper he recognized but also knew was rare. Kirsten had always been even-tempered. Slow to anger, and even when it bubbled up, she worked very hard to keep it from exploding.
She’d grown up around explosive adults and had always told him she wouldn’t let herself be like that. She wanted to be fair. She wanted to be kind. And more often than not, she had been.
Often to her own detriment.
“There is a threat to me, and your expectation is that I should just hide away and…let the men handle it?”
“This isn’t about men or women. It’s about—”
“Knowing and not knowing? Remembering and not remembering?”
“Well, yes.” Which was somehow the wrong answer if her fisting her hands on her hips was anything to go by.
“I can’t help it that I don’t remember.”
“I didn’t say you could help it. It’s just… I’m trained to handle this. This is…because of me. Zach and I are going to handle it because that’s our job.”
“And my job is to sit and twiddle my thumbs?”
He sighed, a headache beginning to drum at his temples. He hoped there was some ibuprofen somewhere in this place. “You don’t have a job in this case. Except to stay safe.”
The jut of her chin was stubborn. But she didn’t argue with him. She took a swipe, instead. Oh, it probably wasn’t a swipe to her, but it felt like one to him.
“Tell me something that only we know,” she demanded.
Every time he thought he’d ushered her away from the topic of them, she circled back around. Demanding. Like she deserved answers.
He figured she did but couldn’t be sure if that was an honest feeling or just his desperation for her to be Kirsten again.
If everything were up to him, he’d tell her everything.
Every second he remembered from the moment he’d laid eyes on her, until that moment she’d woken up in the hospital after too many days in a coma, not remembering.
But it wasn’t up to him. Because he wasn’t a doctor or a psychiatrist or anything but the reason she was in this mess. Maybe if it was guilt stabbing at him, he’d feel less disgusted with himself for giving in.
But it wasn’t guilt. It was want. He wanted her memory back. For her. For him. She’d probably remember and hate him. Push him away. And he’d deserve it.
It would be a damn sight better, living with what he deserved, than rehashing everything he’d done wrong with her when she didn’t remember.
But there was also some glimmer of hope, some piece of the old Ellis not completely dead yet, that thought…if she remembered, if she hated him, at least that was grounds for a second chance.
But she had to remember, and he wouldn’t put her through pain to remember. He couldn’t. So he did what he’d become an expert at for two years. He hedged.
“What would you want to know?”
She gave him that look he knew she’d once given her students when they tried to lie to her about the state of their homework. “If I knew what, I wouldn’t need you to tell me, Ellis.”
“I just don’t know what I could possibly say that would make you remember, and Dr. Leigh—”
“I swear to God I don’t want to hear another damn word about Dr. Leigh.
” She threw her arms up in the air, paced away from him, then back.
She drilled a finger into his chest. “I want to hear about us. Our life. It’s like memory is this…
tangible thing, just out of reach.” She gestured with the hand not currently poking him.
“I know it’s there. I know it, but I need help to get there.
” She pulled back, poked again. Hard. “You are supposed to be helping me.”
Sure. And maybe after he could stab himself through the heart a few times. He placed his hand over the one currently jabbing into him.
Which was a mistake. Hell, being in the same room with her was a mistake, but touching her—no matter how platonically—and her subsequent catch of breath was a special kind of torture.
Which, in fairness, he probably deserved.
Still, he gently removed her finger from his chest, stepped away from her. “I need to call Zach and get an update. Give me a little while to wade through some of this, and we can circle back to this later.”
He made a move for the door, for safety. He got about three steps into the living room before she followed, clearly not giving him any time.
“This isn’t new to this moment, is it?” she said. “You used to use work as an excuse before too. If you didn’t want to face something head-on. Because you knew what to do with work. But you didn’t know what to do with love that felt complicated.”
He turned and stared at her for probably a full minute. There were just no…words. It was definitely not the first time she’d accused him of that. She sounded like Kirsten, like a woman who remembered.
But she was frowning at him as if her own words didn’t make sense.
“Say something,” she ordered.
“I don’t know what to say.” Which was an uncomfortable truth he’d probably never admitted out loud before, but she kept poking at him, this woman who was only a ghost of his wife.
Mixed with a woman he had spent the past two years pretending was just another mission.
And something about that, the moment between just the two of them, her knowing too much already, broke some dam he’d been shoring up and maintaining for so long.
“You don’t owe me any sympathy. God knows everything that’s happened to you is all my fault, but I have spent the past two years in agony keeping myself just out of reach.
And I managed because you needed it, because your safety and well-being demanded it, but I can’t manage if you insist on dredging up everything we were, because to me, we still are. ”
She opened her mouth as if to speak, but damn, he couldn’t let her. He could not let her keep doing this to him. He had to keep her safe.
“So please, for the love of God, give me a damn break.”
Her eyes were bright with tears, but they didn’t fall, and she didn’t argue with him. She gave a little nod. “All right,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “That’s fair.”
“Nothing is fair,” he muttered, pain slicing through him at the fact he’d put those tears in her eyes, and more. So many more.
He turned on a heel and marched outside. Into the frigid cold of a snowy morning. For a moment, he let himself breathe in the sharp, icy air. Let it needle his exposed skin, his lungs. Then he pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed.
“I want to hear everything you’ve come up with,” Ellis demanded harshly to Zach’s, “Hello.” No small talk. No beating around the bush. He had to find his FBI mode again or he might just…lose it.
Zach’s pause was loud. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m great. Never damn better.”
“Ellis, we knew going in this might be complicated. It doesn’t have to be you—”
“Tell me.”
Zach sighed. “All right. Well, I don’t have anything concrete, but I’ll tell you my worst suspicions at the moment. I’ve got some concerns about Dr. Leigh.”