Chapter Fourteen
It was harder than it should have been to disentangle himself from Kirsten. But the fact she remembered…
Well, it made nobility a little shakier. The lines he’d drawn far more…muddled.
Ellis had never been good at muddled.
But Zach would be calling with an update, with information. And the truth was they couldn’t figure out what life looked like now if they didn’t solve the problem of who was out to get them.
Could she really…still love him? Or was she just confused? Maybe she didn’t remember everything about those last few months before he’d left for the undercover assignment.
There was no time to wade through that. Not now. The phone had stopped ringing, but he needed to call Zach back.
“I’ll just step outside.”
Kirsten shook her head. “We’ll do it in the living room and you’ll put it on speaker so we can both hear and contribute,” Kirsten said in that schoolteacher voice of hers. She walked out the door, just like she used to walk into a classroom. In charge and certain.
Except he knew her and knew that was a kind of armor. Especially when she felt neither in charge nor certain.
So he followed her out to the living room. She settled herself onto the couch and, even though he was still a little leery of being close, and what that did to his focus, sat down next to her.
He dialed Zach back, then put the phone on the table on speaker mode.
“I hope you’re calling with some information,” Ellis said when Zach answered.
“Some. We’ve got an ID on the assistant. She has no concrete connections to anything we’ve been looking into so far. I’m emailing all the info I have to you as we speak, along with some pictures the PI got. Everything seems pretty normal on the surface.”
“And under the surface?”
“I’m not convinced she’s who she’s claiming to be,” Zach replied. Ellis could hear the tap of Zach typing while he spoke. “There’s something a little too pat about the woman. It looks exactly like what I’d put together for an undercover plant.”
Ellis didn’t like the sound of that, but he got up to retrieve his laptop. He opened it, clicked the email client. He tried not to scowl when Kirsten reached over and tilted the laptop so she could see the screen too.
It shouldn’t bother him she wanted to help. That she remembered. It was all good.
But he didn’t know how to carry the weight of it all.
One step at a time.
An email from Zach popped up, so he skimmed the contents.
The assistant’s name—or fake name—was Sarah Conway.
Thirty-two. Education in psychology, but no actual licenses, just degrees.
Born in Colorado, spent most of her life there.
Moved to Fairmont, Wyoming, in May. Had been working for Dr. Leigh since then, remotely a few months prior, but definitely not the whole time Kirsten had been going to Dr. Leigh.
Was it all a coincidence?
Ellis listened to Zach explain his next steps—keep watch on this Sarah, keep mining information on the Carusos who weren’t in jail—while he opened the picture attachments to the email.
The pictures were fairly clear, but not particularly close-up. Ellis zoomed in on the face in profile walking into a store, then full on coming back out. She maybe looked…vaguely familiar, but nothing concrete. He was probably overthinking the vaguely familiar and—
“Oh my God,” Kirsten said, leaning toward the screen. “Don’t you know who that is?” Kirsten demanded. “The hair is different. The way she’s holding herself. But I’d recognize that mouth anywhere.”
He looked over at her. She was scowling at the screen, something angry in her expression.
He looked back at the picture again. Focusing on the mouth of the woman in the picture.
And muttered a curse under his breath as a familiar feeling worked its way through him—disappointment and the excitement of a lead twining together.
“Who is it?” Zach demanded.
“Her name is Colleen Fredericks. She worked at the FBI Office in Chicago in public affairs.”
She’d been a friend for a while, but then things had gotten…complicated. He glanced at Kirsten. Mostly because his wife—who liked just about everyone—hadn’t liked her. So Ellis had started to keep his distance.
“Are you sure?”
“I am,” Kirsten said darkly.
“So you’re…remembering?” Zach said, with a carefulness to his tone.
“Yes,” Kirsten said with no equivocations, when Ellis didn’t think they could be unequivocal about it until she talked to Dr. Leigh. Until they really went through everything, but they didn’t have time for that.
They didn’t have time for anything if Colleen Fredericks was somehow involved with Dr. Leigh.
Zach paused, and Ellis could only imagine what was going on in Zach’s head when it came to Kirsten remembering.
“I think we should steer clear of Dr. Leigh until we get to the bottom of this. I’ll look into Colleen—”
“Let me handle figuring out Colleen,” Ellis interrupted. “She was still at the office when this all went down two years ago. Let me track that. You focus on figuring out how she got connected to Dr. Leigh, and who she might be talking to outside that office.”
“All right. My PI is supposed to get me an update by five. I’ll be in touch by then. Let me know what you come up with, if there’s any more I can dig into.”
Ellis agreed and they said their goodbyes.
He stood, too much energy pumping through him. Colleen Fredericks. A woman he knew, but she’d changed her look. She was clearly hiding something. Would he have recognized her if he’d come face-to-face with her? Would Kirsten have recognized her without having her memories back?
He looked down at her, still sitting on the couch. “Well, I guess you remembered in the nick of time.”
Her mouth curved. Her eyes were sad and didn’t meet his, but he couldn’t discount that it was a lead he wouldn’t have picked up on. At least not at first. Maybe it would have come to him eventually, but maybe too late.
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” he muttered. “Why would she have a fake identity? Be working for Dr. Leigh? She was in public affairs. Not psychology. Not undercover work.”
“But she wasn’t your biggest fan, was she?” Kirsten replied primly.
“I hardly think me blowing her off made her want to…whatever this is. Jesus. If she’s involved in this…” He didn’t even know. It was so incomprehensible. “I don’t think I have that kind of power, Kirsten. And you don’t either.”
“No, I imagine there’s something more complicated at play, but the truth is she did have a thing for you, and she wasn’t happy when you put distance between the two of you.”
Ellis had never been fully on board with Kirsten’s view of the situation, but he was hardly going to get into a fight with his wife over a woman who didn’t matter. It was easier to put the distance between him and Colleen. And Colleen being weird to him after that was just…
“I never told you,” Kirsten said very quietly. “It meant a lot to me. That you listened and didn’t make me out to be some crazy jealous wife. That you believed me and what I saw, or at least let it matter enough.”
It was the kind of blunt, emotional truth they didn’t tend to get into with each other.
But he felt like if she was going to give it, he owed her.
Hell, he owed her everything. “You never gave me any reason not to believe you.” In spite of himself, he could remember everything about her.
All the memories he’d tried to forget while she’d been essentially someone else. Always right there. Always pain.
But here in this moment, with her remembering, some of them didn’t feel as much like pain as they had.
“Hell, you made Olivia a baby blanket.” Olivia had been his high school girlfriend, and because her parents were friends with his stepdad, they’d run into each other on occasion.
There’d been no jealousy on Kirsten’s part there.
Kirsten smiled. It was warm. Friendly. Her. Not the shell of her that her life as Jessica had been.
And still, he didn’t know how to trust it. How to believe it was this easy. Not that her throwing up last night and falling apart was easy. It just seemed…fast. To spend two years in the dark only to remember almost overnight.
Maybe not overnight. She’d claimed to remember things before this, and he could hardly discount her. It was just…
She stood, crossed to him. He tensed in spite of himself. He was just so used to having to hold himself back, having to protect her from everything he felt. And now she remembered and he didn’t know what to do with all the rules he’d set for himself.
They seemed imperative. And very, very tenuous. Especially when she reached up and cupped his face with her palms. When she studied him with big brown eyes, shiny with tears.
“Ellis.”
“We’ve got so much work to do.” His voice was too rough, so he cleared his throat. “The internet is terrible up here. It’ll take me forever to—”
“Ellis.” She wound her arms around his neck, pressed her body to his. Pleasure and pain. Everything they’d been. Everything they’d lost. Everything he still had to do.
“We’ll do all that work,” she said quietly, moving onto her toes so their mouths were at the same height. “We’ll have to. I just need… We lost so much time.”
Did she have any idea? Did the time feel the same to her? Did she have any idea the excruciating pain of remembering? No more than he could imagine what it was like to forget.
So weren’t they at odds again? Even if she remembered. Different places. Different wants, needs.
Except when she pressed her mouth to his, there was only want. Only one need. And she seemed to share it since she was the one pressing herself to him. Kissing him like the weight of losing him sat as heavy on her as losing her had sat on him.
This was his wife. The wife he thought he’d lost in a million different ways.
But she was right here.
KIRSTEN WASN’T FOOLISH enough to think this was wise. And still, she just…needed it. To feel connected to him like this again. To run her hands over his hair. To feel the scrape of his whiskers against her chin. To taste and be tasted. To touch and be touched.