Chapter 11
Luke let Jenna’s words settle.
Or was it Ellie? Would he ever think of her that way?
Ellie Johnson. Ellie Barone. Jenna Jones. Jenna King.
The woman he’d married, the mother of his children, had been living under a name that wasn’t hers from the moment he met her. Every time he’d said her name he’d been saying something that belonged to a life she’d been given, not a life she’d chosen.
He remembered how protective she’d always been of the kids. How she’d been jumpy. How she’d always thought in worst-case scenarios.
At the time, he’d dismissed that as part of her personality. But what if there was more to it? What if she’d acted like that because she was running for her life?
He hadn’t put it together. Not until now.
He set those thoughts aside and focused on what he could process.
Jenna had been protecting him and the kids. That was what she said. She’d left to keep everyone safe. She’d walked away from the life they’d built together because staying had become dangerous.
She’d also made that decision alone without giving him the chance to weigh in.
His jaw hardened at the thought.
“So you left. You didn’t tell us. Didn’t tell me.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Jenna, I could have helped. You could have told me about WitSec. I thought we shared everything, that we didn’t keep secrets.”
A new emotion crossed her face. It wasn’t surprise. It was more like she’d been expecting his comment and dreading it at the same time.
“I couldn’t tell you about WitSec,” she told him. “Believe me—I wanted to. But I was told I couldn’t. That I would put everything in jeopardy if I did. That I needed to forget who I used to be and pretend like she didn’t exist.”
He’d never met her family. He understood why now. She’d come to him with no past she could share and no people she could name, and he’d loved her without ever knowing the silence had been forced on her.
“What about when this marshal approached you at the store? You never thought about telling me that?”
“You helping me would have meant upending your life. Our children’s lives.
All of us would’ve been targets. It would have meant new identities.
A new place to live. No contact with your family.
” She held his gaze. “I’ve lived that life, Luke.
For years before I met you. It was hard, and it was lonely, and it wasn’t what I wanted for you. For our children.”
“There had to be another way.” He shook his head. “There had to be something—”
“I couldn’t take you away from your family. You had just lost Sarah. Your mother, your brothers and sisters—they were grieving. They needed you here.” She paused. “If you had disappeared too, with no explanation, no goodbye . . . it would have destroyed them.”
Luke opened his mouth then closed it again.
She wasn’t wrong. He knew she wasn’t wrong. His family had been wrecked by Sarah’s death and had spent months barely keeping themselves together.
Luke had been the one they leaned on, the one who showed up. If he’d vanished only a year later . . .
He pushed the thought away. It led somewhere he wasn’t ready to go.
“But the children.” The words came out rougher than he intended. He stopped. Then he tried again. “Your children.” His voice dropped to almost nothing. “Our children.”
“Our children would have become targets. They would have been hunted along with me. I couldn’t let that happen. I had to disappear before these people discovered my new life and made everyone I love pay the price.”
The anger he’d been holding onto all morning loosened at the edges, and something underneath it surfaced, something he hadn’t let himself feel in a very long time.
His children had spent the last two years living with a hole in their hearts the shape of their mother.
Liam had gone quiet. Cora had mostly stopped asking. Jonah had no idea what he was missing.
Jenna’s eyes filled with moisture. She didn’t look away from him. She let the tears come without trying to stop them.
Something about her crying, about the fact she wasn’t hiding her tears, showed him the toll this had taken on her.
The realization undid something in his chest.
“This wasn’t what I wanted.” Her voice broke on the last word. “Not for a single day. But I’m their mother. My job is to keep them safe. Even when keeping them safe meant . . . even when it meant leaving. Better a broken heart than a broken body.”
Part of Luke wanted to think this was a joke.
Jenna’s story sounded unlikely and larger than life. It sounded like the kind of thing that happened in movies, not here in Small Town, Virginia. But deep down he knew this could really be true.
This was the woman he’d met at a fundraiser in Charlottesville, the one he’d spent three months wearing down until she finally agreed to have dinner with him.
He looked into her eyes and knew she was telling the truth.
However, he had no idea what to do with that knowledge.
Jenna watched Luke sit with everything she’d told him and wished she could read his expression the way she used to.
At one time, she’d been fluent in Luke King. Her time away had cost her that too.
He looked up finally. “Why now? Why come back now, after two years?”
She swallowed hard before saying. “Because Roderick is dead.”
Something shifted in his expression. “What?”
“He was shot three months ago. The marshals contacted me. Told me the threat had been neutralized. I was no longer in danger. Between Roderick’s death and his father’s dementia, the organization had fallen apart. I was . . . well, I was free.”
He blinked. “So you came back.”
“Not right away. I didn’t know how to come back.
I didn’t know if I even had the right to come back.
” She paused to gather her thoughts. “I wasn’t sure how you’d feel.
Whether you’d want to see me at all. Whether it would only make things worse for you and the children to have me show up after everything. ”
He said nothing for a long moment.
She’d wondered, during those two long years, whether he had moved on.
When she was free to return, she wondered whether she would arrive in Blue Ridge Hollow to find someone else in her place—a woman who made Luke’s coffee in the morning and helped Cora with her hair and knew all the things about him Jenna had once known.
So for a month, she’d watched from a distance, and she’d seen that he hadn’t found someone to replace her. That he’d been carrying all this heartache alone.
That knowledge had brought her both relief and a grief she hadn’t expected.
“I almost didn’t come,” she continued. “I told myself I was being selfish. That you’d all built a life without me that I had no business walking back into. But I couldn’t make myself stay away.”
Luke studied her face, and she could see him turning her words over in his mind—everything she’d told him, everything her explanation meant, everything that came after it.
He hadn’t settled on anything yet. She could see that in his expression. He was somewhere in the middle of it all, trying to find solid ground.
“What do you want from me, Jenna?” His voice sounded quiet but not unkind.
She’d known the question was coming, but she didn’t have a clean answer.
“I don’t know exactly.” She shrugged. “I know I don’t deserve to walk back in and pick up where we left off. I know I have no right to ask you for anything. But I’m not here asking you to forgive me overnight. I just needed you to know the truth. After everything, you deserved that much.”
Luke looked at the cross at the front of the church. Jenna thought about all the things still unsaid. There were details that would take more than one conversation to get through. Then there was the question of what any of this meant going forward.
There was so much still to cover. They’d barely scratched the surface, and she still didn’t know what he was thinking or feeling or whether anything she’d said had landed the way she needed it to.
She opened her mouth to say something—she wasn’t sure what—and stopped.
A sound caught her ear.
Somewhere behind them, a floorboard shifted.
They both turned toward the noise.
An empty church stared back. The aisle stretched toward the entrance, pews silent on either side as the morning light fell through the stained glass.
She looked at Luke and knew he wasn’t willing to take any risks.
Something had caused that sound.
More than likely . . . someone.