Chapter Nine
When Ellis went outside, Jessica let a few tears fall. Bottling them up didn’t do anything, particularly when there was no one in here to witness them. So she let them out, wiped them away, then marched back into the room he was staying in.
She stared at the wall. She wasn’t going to wait around for Zach and Ellis to handle everything. Maybe, in the end, they’d be the ones who figured everything out, who saved the day. Maybe that’s what former FBI agents did.
But that didn’t mean she didn’t get to try—to understand, to figure things out, to remember.
She poked around the little desk with a computer and printer, found a blank legal pad and a pen, and then pulled the chair over so she could sit in it and look at the wall.
It was mostly names, so she sought to put together a kind of timeline. An attempt to make sense of all this nonsense in her own head, in her own time.
He didn’t have the details of the actual night she was hurt up there, and she wanted them. Wanted to know how he’d been shot, since she’d clearly witnessed it if it haunted her dreams. Wanted to know the details of how she’d suffered a traumatic brain injury.
She closed her eyes for a moment, tried to picture it. She could see that dream vision of him, his bloody shirt torn. His face pale. Pain in his eyes. She could see that. No one could have put that in her head, and how could she have dreamed it up if it wasn’t something true that she’d experienced?
Which meant there were other memories inside of her, and maybe they were all that painful, but maybe the answer to all this was in her own mind somewhere.
She opened her eyes and glanced at the doorway. She didn’t jump or screech or even jolt. Somehow, even though he hadn’t made a peep, she’d known he’d be standing in the doorway staring at her. Like she’d lived this kind of moment a million times over.
She probably had.
She would say she didn’t know what love looked like, except she had spent two years existing in the world of Hope Town.
She had been around Zach and his wife. She had been on the periphery of Lia entering into a relationship with Corporal Fairhurst. But it wasn’t just romantic love like that.
It was Zach and Lucy with their kids. It was Lia with Corporal Fairhurst’s niece, who worked at the bakery.
It was Albennie, Lia, and Franny Perkins and their little trio of friendship.
One born of knowing each other. She had spent the past two years seeing what love looked like in all sorts of scenarios, knowing she couldn’t partake because she didn’t know herself.
She saw it—hand in hand with misery—in Ellis’s changeable hazel eyes.
She worried she was fooling herself that something echoed inside of her. Like a memory of whatever love existed before her memory loss. She had no doubt she’d loved him, but she worried any feelings were just…wishful thinking. Wishful remembering.
Maybe, what she felt was just that same misery.
He said nothing, like he was trapped there.
There was no denying he was handsome. If he’d been an FBI agent the entire time they’d been together, he’d no doubt always been this fit. This impressive. But it was the eyes that seemed to hook inside her with a pained, wistful yearning.
“How did we meet?”
He was so quiet and so still for so long she was beginning to think he wouldn’t answer.
“I’m sorry. You told me to give you a break. I just…” She didn’t have any excuse, except this feeling inside of her that didn’t make sense to her.
He moved then, breathed, shifted. “College.” He crossed the threshold and went to sit on the edge of the bed. She turned in her chair to face him. If he was going to answer, maybe this was an okay topic.
“We had a class together?”
He shook his head. “I saw you on the quad. You were talking with a friend. I went up to you and you gave me your number.”
“Just like that?”
There was almost the hint of a smile on his face. “Just like that.”
She wanted to ask him if it was love at first sight, but it felt too intimate an ask, even if she was one of the people in the scenario. And she’d felt the anguish in him when he’d said we still are.
So she could let it go. For now. She turned back to the wall, tapped pen to paper. “I’m trying to make a timeline. Just to make sense of the events in my head.”
“Well, we were both injured two years ago in the attack. It was at our home outside Chicago just about two months before we arrived here in Hope Town. I was in the hospital for a week. You were in a coma for most of that time. We were under protective custody there, so even once I was released, I stayed with you while we determined how to move forward. We were discussing WitSec options when you came to. The doctors thought your memory would start to return after a few days, but it didn’t.
And we were running out of time, so we had to move. ”
She frowned at him, trying to cast back to that time, but even the hospital was a blank to her. The first thing she really remembered was… Her frown deepened, a headache started to drum at her temples, tension creeping into her neck.
Did she remember her hospital room? His devastated eyes and his arm in a sling? People in suits. Whispers. Confusion. Fear.
She looked down at her pad of paper and added the details to her timeline, but that still didn’t fully make sense of what they were doing, what the threat was…and the mystery, in her mind, of what their marriage had been.
“But what about before?”
“Before?”
“You’d been undercover? You said you weren’t coming home to me, so where were you? Where was I? How long was this going on?”
He paused a moment, looked down at his hands clasped lightly between his legs. He didn’t look at her when he spoke. “It was a three-month assignment. I had about a month left. I was meeting with my contact at the FBI when he was informed there’d been a break-in at our address.”
“So…we hadn’t seen each other for two months?”
“Correct.”
He said that so…detached. Like he probably did in meetings with his FBI coworkers. There was a story here she was missing. Complications, personal complications, he didn’t want to divulge.
Was he hiding something? Should she press? Was it all immaterial because there was a threat against her? She didn’t know how to determine how to get to the bottom of that.
But she wasn’t given the chance to.
“I’d like to talk to you about Dr. Leigh.”
It was a complete turn of subject, and she didn’t understand it. Or like it at all. She fidgeted in her seat. “What about Dr. Leigh?”
“Not about…anything you’ve talked about that you feel is private. Not about your responses. More about what she’s asked you, what she might have pressed on that felt strange or off or just didn’t add up to you.”
“You think she’s…part of it?”
Ellis sighed. “The fact of the matter is, a very small number of people know your true identity and how you came to be a resident of Hope Town. There’s me.
There’s Zach. Faith and Lane know some things about our relationship, about my connection to the FBI, but not the details of why you’re in Hope Town or where you came from.
I suppose, with my real name, they might have been able to figure out some things, but nothing that would actually bring a threat to our door.
Dr. Leigh is really…the only person aside from Zach and I who knows almost the full picture.
So we want to make sure there’s no breach there.
I just need to know what you talk to her about, and we’ll go from there. ”
She thought about her sessions with Dr. Leigh.
They weren’t always comfortable. She didn’t always leave feeling happy or settled or supported, but…
But she had trusted Dr. Leigh implicitly.
About everything. It was terrifying that someone she’d trusted might be a problem, that she might have unknowingly and unwillingly said something to cause all… this.
But Ellis knew everything. He was the ringleader of this whole…whatever it was. He was her husband. “You’re telling me Dr. Leigh didn’t tell you anything about our sessions?”
“The only thing she’s discussed with me is how to approach you. How to be around you. She’s never gotten into the details of your sessions. She—and I—considered that private. Patient-doctor confidentiality.”
How to approach you. Dr. Leigh had spoken of Ellis on occasion, on what he made her feel. Because she asked about all the people Jessica came into contact with. Because Dr. Leigh had been working with her on trusting her own instincts, her own feelings.
It’s the only way you can navigate through the world without memories, Jessica. To develop your own sense of self, your own judgments. Had that even been real?
The thought of this all made panic start beating in her chest again. How could she develop anything when she wasn’t anyone she remembered? When she was married and a target and—
Ellis stood and crossed over to her. He crouched in front of her, putting a light hand over the one clutching her own thigh.
“Kirsten,” he said, calmly and directly.
She managed to look away from his hand on hers and met his gaze. She still wasn’t used to him calling her that, but she’d told him to. Insisted. In this moment, she wished she hadn’t. She wanted to ignore Kirsten and him and a past she couldn’t remember, and pretend everything was simple.
But it wasn’t simple, and she had a role in it. She cleared her throat, surprisingly steadied by his hand on hers.
“I tell her how I’ve been feeling. We talk a lot about…when I’m anxious. What is the source of that anxiety. Obviously, I think it’s what I don’t remember. She’s worked with me on…trusting myself. Making my own mind up about situations and people even though I don’t remember.”
Ellis nodded, still crouching there in what had to be an uncomfortable position. “Okay, good. What about these dreams—like me being shot. Did you tell her about those?”
“Not the one about you being shot. I was going to make an appointment Monday, because everything felt so…unsettled. But I hadn’t done it yet.”
“Were there other dreams you shared with her?”
She thought back. Tried to remember. Probably, but nothing concrete came to mind in this moment. She looked at him helplessly.
“Ellis, she’s been… She’s been a touchstone. A foundation for me these past two years. I couldn’t have settled into a life with such a blank slate without her guiding me.”
His expression was grim. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
ELLIS HATED HOW destroyed she looked. Like he’d ripped out all her foundations and she was left with nothing.
Isn’t that your MO?
“I’m sorry. I know this isn’t—”
“What if we told her I remembered?” Kirsten demanded, sharp and determined.
Enough that Ellis was taken aback. “Why… What?”
She took his hand out from under hers and got to her feet, so he had to as well. He stepped back as she began to pace. Not like a woman who’d had her foundations ripped out, but like a woman with a plan.
“We tell her I remember and see how she reacts. See if she acts weird about it. Wouldn’t that be a sign that she’s involved in something?”
“If she’s involved, if she’s a threat, we wouldn’t want her thinking that you remember. Particularly when you don’t.”
“Why not? If it gets to the bottom of the threat, doesn’t that mean we can protect ourselves from it?”
He’d believed that. Once.
“It’s too risky. It’s—”
“What if we bring it up to her like, like couples counseling. For getting through two years of not remembering we were married. Maybe we say the whole…crime part of it is still fuzzy. I don’t remember how I came to have amnesia. I just remember you. Us.”
She was pacing. Coming up with a plan. Bouncing back quickly from the emotional turmoil of not trusting her therapist anymore.
And the word us pierced through him like any bullet.
“You’d be part of it,” she continued. “You could observe her and ask her questions that way. You could be looking for whatever it is you FBI agents look for.”
It wasn’t a bad idea. If she was anyone else, he would have jumped on the idea right away, but…
“I’m worried pretending like you remember might be difficult for you.”
“Stop worrying about my psychological well-being. I won’t have a psyche to worry about if this is actually a threat and I wind up dead.”
Dark, but true.
“I can’t do this,” she said, sounding agitated but in control. “Just exist in this place where maybe she’s bad, maybe she isn’t. Maybe we’re under a threat, maybe we’re not. Maybe what I dream or feel is a memory, maybe it’s not. I can’t… I need to act. I need to.”
He understood that need better than anyone, and still he hesitated, because acting put her in turmoil.
But she was already there, wasn’t she, whether he did anything or not?
“I’ll need to run it by Zach. We’d need his help and cooperation.
” And approval, though he didn’t say that out loud.
He couldn’t trust his own judgment on this.
He needed an outside party to tell him if he was insane for even considering this.
“I’ll need to make a plan. For what we’re trying to get to the bottom of. ”
“Good. Good.” She nodded, stopped her pacing. She let out a slow breath like she could relax because he was going along with it. She even tried to smile. “I don’t want to sit around and wait, twiddle my thumbs, be a…a victim. Maybe that’s who I used to be, but—”
“It wasn’t. Never. You’ve always been a…a…champion. Of anyone. Your students. Me.”
She stared at him then, those dark eyes serious. “What about myself?”
He could only stare back at her, that moment he’d left to go on the undercover mission fresh in his mind.
She hadn’t come right out and said she wanted a divorce.
She hadn’t come right out and said he wouldn’t be welcome back, and because of that he’d been able to convince himself when it was over, he’d fix everything.
But he’d come to accept in the past two years that what he’d chosen would have been the end—with or without the way things went down.
“You were used to putting everyone else first, but I think you were learning how to consider yourself too. Maybe not a champion yet, but you were getting there.”
She nodded, as if she agreed. As if that made sense to her. She turned to look at the wall of people, dates, and everything that had led them here.
“Then I want to get there, whether I remember or not. Talk to Zach. Talk to whoever, but if Dr. Leigh somehow did this to us, I want to be part of getting to the bottom of it.”