Chapter Ten
She made dinner for them that night. Even though it was just putting together some nonperishable items to create a meal, the motions steadied her.
And there was something about having someone to cook for that made it even more enjoyable.
She wasn’t just keeping herself alive, she was extending that courtesy to someone else.
Ellis had taken the phone call with Zach outside. Spoken in low tones for a long time, then come back in with a red nose and watery eyes from the frigid cold. He stopped short, without fully closing the door behind him, presumably at the sight of her putting food on the table.
“I made dinner,” she explained.
“You didn’t have to go through that trouble,” he said a little gruffly.
“Heating up some canned soup and green beans is hardly trouble.”
“Zach is going to do some poking around. He wants to make sure if we set any bait for Dr. Leigh we’re ready to handle it.
If we have some kind of therapy session with her, he wants to find a way to record it without her knowing, and he wants backup ready to come up here in case somehow Dr. Leigh has more eyes on us than we realize.
He’ll get back to me tomorrow, and we’ll go from there. ”
Eyes. She couldn’t help but look around, suddenly feeling like a million eyes were on her. But that was silly. She forced herself to take a seat at the little table in the kitchen and pointed to the one across from her. “Sit. Eat.”
He hesitated. She understood why when he sat down at the table. Across from her. With the little fake Christmas tree in the corner twinkling its colorful lights.
She was getting damn tired of the way things felt familiar, and yet she didn’t know why. She didn’t like causing him pain, and her questions about their old life seemed to, but…
She had to know things. She just had to ask about the things that popped into her mind. “How did we celebrate Christmas?”
He didn’t look up, but he paused in his eating. She couldn’t see his eyes, but the cast of his mouth was…pained.
It was clear just about everything she did caused him pain, and it twisted her insides into a million knots.
But so did everything. Until she could find some understanding in the midst of all this not knowing, everything was going to hurt.
She didn’t relish hurting him—whether that was because some part of her, deep underneath all the trauma, knew him, or simply because she was the kind of person who didn’t like to cause pain—she didn’t really know.
She supposed she hoped it was a little of both, and that there was some…solution to be found before this was all over.
He cleared his throat, set his fork down like he couldn’t stomach eating and rehashing Christmas.
“You were very into Christmas. You liked to decorate. Make cookies all month.” There was a fondness mixed in with the pain. She didn’t need to remember or know him to recognize that. “You Christmas shopped all year long. You were always on the lookout for the best presents.”
“What about you?”
He paused for a second, like he was considering his answer. “It was pretty common that I had to work Christmas day. That was why you’d tend to make it a month-long event.”
“No, I mean, did you like Christmas?”
“Kirsten, I’m just not sure—”
But she didn’t want to hear any more about how he wasn’t supposed to talk about this, how Dr. Leigh thought it would be bad for her. Particularly when he and Zach suspected Dr. Leigh.
“Ellis, the more honest you are, the more you tell me, maybe it unlocks something. To me that makes more sense than this idea that never upsetting me is going to allow me to heal. Not knowing is upsetting too. And this subject is pretty innocuous. Did you like Christmas or not?”
He sighed. “I had some painful memories tied to Christmas.”
“Like?”
He picked his fork back up, took a bite of green beans. He did not meet her gaze. “Both my parents died in December, so it was never a happy time for me. You tried to change that.”
She frowned a little. “That sounds insensitive.”
He shook his head, a slight smile curving his mouth. “No. You were never insensitive. You hadn’t had the greatest childhood Christmases either. You just really tried to make something that was ours, aside from the pain.”
Something about that warmed her. The idea of trying to make something good, for them.
But it also brought home the fact she didn’t know anything about her family aside from him.
“What about my parents? Do they know…?” She couldn’t put words to it.
Surely she had some broader life outside of Ellis Sutton.
He must have read her anxiety, because he didn’t hedge his answers here. “You never knew your father. Your mother was not a stable figure in your life and often made choices that… She never prioritized you or your half sister’s safety, so the relationship was…rocky at best.”
“I have a sister?”
“You haven’t spoken in a few years. Same with your mother. Neither one of them could quite be happy for you finding some stability in your life, which they considered marriage and me. It caused friction, and when you started to set boundaries, they became unreachable.”
It brought no thoughts, no memories, no emotions. “Do they think I’m dead?”
“Honestly? I’m not sure. Because they’d gone no contact, I couldn’t get in touch with them before we had to leave Chicago.
It’s possible they don’t know anything. It’s possible they saw a news story and think you’re dead.
It’s hard to say, but…” He trailed off, tightened up.
Focused on eating and never finished that sentence.
“But what?” she demanded, because there was something more there and she deserved to know it.
He sighed, met her gaze. “I think if they believed you were dead, they would have come out of the woodwork. There was a bit of a media cycle around what happened to us. They could have made some money off of playing the grieving family.” He must have noted the horror on her face. “Sorry if that sounds callous.”
She blinked, tried to work around the confusing emotions inside of her. But…she’d asked him for information, and he’d given it. She couldn’t be mad about whatever truths existed out there. “Is it callous if it’s the truth?”
“It took you a long time to learn, to accept you couldn’t save them from themselves. You went through a lot of hurt at their hands. The last few years, you’d tried to harden yourself to it, but it was hard on you. No matter what you try, you’ve got a soft heart.”
She could tell he was trying to be somewhat…detached. Like an impartial observer. But emotion leaked into his voice at the end there, like he couldn’t quite help it.
He looked down, away from her gaze, and exchanged fork for spoon and began to eat his soup. “You should eat,” he said between swallows. “Keep your strength up.”
She might have looked away, picked up her own spoon, but something was…taking shape in her mind. Like a memory. What she might have not so long ago waved off as a dream. A strange, confusing dream.
But now she knew that these might be real. These flashes of a life she didn’t understand or recognize. Just like him with a bullet wound, or him in that tuxedo.
Sitting in a room with blue walls and soft, pastel paintings of forests hanging up. Sitting on the end of an unmade bed. Feeling twisted and torn up about…about… Her family. The family she couldn’t trust.
“We were supposed to be starting a family, and I didn’t want them hurting a child like they’d hurt me. So I finally cut them off.”
He looked up. She saw the intensity in his eyes but also noted that he was holding himself carefully. Again, trying to detach from…whatever was happening.
“You remember that?” he asked carefully.
“I think so? It’s…strange. I can picture certain things, feel certain things, but the bigger picture is missing.
I can’t picture what they look like, I don’t know their names, but I can…
put myself back into that moment of realizing if I wanted kids of my own, I would have to keep my life separate from theirs. ”
She couldn’t read his expression or his thoughts—another familiar feeling, but she could read the strange…guilt in his eyes.
“Ellis, regardless of whether Dr. Leigh is some kind of leak, whether she is working against me or not, she was wrong. Having the framework of my family situation allowed me to remember that moment, remember something. Which means you should share it all. And you shouldn’t worry about it.
I know you don’t want to hurt me, and I’m sorry if it does, but I need to know. ”
ELLIS WANTED TO believe her. Hell, he wanted to tell her every moment of their lives if it got her to a place where she remembered everything, but…it felt wrong. It felt like a dangerous tightrope. Maybe this story had unearthed a memory, but what if he took a wrong turn? Pushed too hard?
Maybe Dr. Leigh was a liar, working against them, but… He couldn’t get over his fear of hurting her more than she’d already been hurt.
“I think we need to be careful about doing too much,” he said carefully. “You remembered a piece of something today. That’s a positive. Maybe tomorrow—”
“Being a father terrified you,” she said, with a strange triumphant note to her voice. “I remember that too. The fight we had before your last job.”
He had no words for that, because…he didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. “What?”
“I remember… I remember arguing with you. You wanted to take that last job because…because I was ready to have a baby, and it scared you.”
Ellis was struggling to work through any of this. But this was the first memory she was claiming to have that was flat-out wrong. There’d been no fight, and he sure as hell hadn’t been scared.
“No, I wasn’t scared. I just…needed the accolades. I needed some intangible thing. It wasn’t fear. It was about my work, my self-worth. Taking the job wasn’t about having kids. We’d always planned to have kids.”
“It was,” she replied stubbornly. Then she tapped her temple. “Don’t lie to me. I remember it.”
“Kirsten, I’m sorry, but that’s not right.”
“It is,” she insisted, while his heart beat in wild, painful rhythm against his chest. He convinced himself it was because…she was wrong, and he didn’t want to hurt her or her progress, but he couldn’t let this idea he’d been afraid stand.
Fear had nothing to do with it.
“I remember the fight,” she said stubbornly.
“You said you were taking this last job, and I was furious, because…because you were scared and just kept talking about how important the job was. I told you that you were scared of being a dad, because…because you’d lost yours, and then your stepdad… You didn’t like him?”
“I liked him fine,” Ellis replied gruffly. “You’re misremembering things.” If she was remembering at all. Because that had not been a fight they’d had.
“You didn’t want to be like him, and you were afraid that was all you had in you.”
He wanted to argue with her words, but… Well, they hit a little too close to a soft, bruised place he didn’t like to visit. And whether she was right or wrong, there was one simple fact. “This was not an argument we had.”
“I remember it!”
He worked to keep his voice calm, even, no matter how agitated she got.
“I don’t know what to tell you. I certainly don’t remember anything of the sort, and since I’m not the one with a traumatic brain injury, I think I’ll take my own word for it.
” It was too harsh, but she’d never accused him of being afraid. She’d never accused him of anything.
They hadn’t even really argued about the mission. She’d said she didn’t think he should go. She didn’t think they were in a good place for him to go.
She’d said he was breaking his promise.
But they hadn’t fought. They never really fought. Someone expressed an opinion. The other one didn’t agree. They both did what they thought was right and…that was it.
He’d told her he had to go. Had to.
She’d said goodbye with tears in her eyes, and he’d thought…maybe that was the end. Not just goodbye for now.
But he’d convinced himself he’d make it up to her. He’d fix it when he got back, when he did what he had to do—a driving, desperate need. He could see now that he’d been wrong, but that’s what he’d thought in the moment.
It hadn’t been fear. The plan had always been to have a family. Why would he suddenly be afraid of something that he’d always wanted? At least with Kirsten.
Why should he believe the woman who had a traumatic brain injury over his own recollections?
But it sat there, a piece of sand, irritating and impossible to remove. Like it was a better label for all those feelings than seeking external validation.
“Are you lying to me because—”
His temper snapped, frayed at the edges, but he held it in. And spoke through gritted teeth. “I am not lying about anything.”
“You’ve been lying to me for two years.”
That accusation landed hard, and for a few humming moments he could only stare at her. Her brown eyes narrowed. Her mouth a hard line.
Lied to her? When he’d done everything…anything and everything to keep her alive and well and safe?
From something that was your fault, remember?
He stood abruptly. “Thank you for making dinner. I’ll handle cleanup.”
She didn’t immediately say anything to that. Not then, and not when he started collecting dishes and heading to the tiny sink. She sat there the entire time he washed every last dish by hand. He could feel her eyes on him.
But she said nothing. She did nothing. And now that the dishes were done, he sure as hell didn’t know what to do. He needed to get some work done, but he didn’t know how to leave this space, this room, without it feeling like some kind of…fight.
It wasn’t a fight. They didn’t fight.
No, she gets quiet and you walk away.
Well, then things were back to normal after all.