Page 24 of Hunted in Hope Town

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?”