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If only her parents had informed her of her adoption. Maybe she wouldn’t have been caught off guard by Brody’s pronouncement of her true identity.

Jenna didn’t resent many things in her life, but she resented the fact that her parents had hid the truth. She was confident that they didn’t do anything wrong. But that didn’t eliminate the bitter taste in her mouth.

She’d taken too much time. Jenna glanced around the room, making sure nothing important got missed in her haste.

Her sweeping gaze touched on the standing mirror her parents had given her for her sixteenth birthday because she’d always thought such mirrors were elegant. Then on the vanity table Dad bought at an auction. The table had been dull and scratched. Jenna thought it should have been tossed out, but Mom proved her wrong when she lovingly stripped it, re-sanded the wood and stained it so the wood gleamed like new. Swallowing hard, she continued her scan hurrying past the family portrait on the wall. It hurt too much. Every item spoke of love and connection. Would she ever see this room again?

Worst, that familiar feeling of warmth and home had been invaded, giving this room a feeling of wrongness.

She couldn’t keep doing this. She had to hurry. She went to the bedside table and grabbed her hearing aid charger. Unplugging it from the wall, she tossed it into her overnight bag. Gone were the days when she needed to rely on small batteries. Now, she could recharge her aids every night and hear the next day. She checked the hearing aid app on her phone. Her hearing aids still had enough charge to get her through the next few hours. She liked to remove them as soon as she came home to give herself a hearing break, but tonight that wasn’t a possibility. She needed to hear what was going on.

One of her greatest fears was that she would forget her hearing aids or her charger would break and she’d be left without any usable hearing. While she had some hearing without the devices, understanding speech remained a challenge. Some higher voices, such as children or Carly’s higher pitch, were virtually non-existent. Her dad’s deeper tones had been easier to hear, but even then she missed most of his words without her hearing aids.

Unlike some deaf individuals, Jenna had never been able to develop the skill of lipreading. Nor did she sign. She relied completely on her hearing and her voice to communicate.

Hitting the side button to put her phone into sleep mode, she then slipped it into her back pocket.

As she turned to head back to her bag, she saw something else that she’d missed before. Her laptop was open. She never left her laptop open. Someone had specifically come into her room and read through her information. Had they been able to figure out her code?

Probably not. Had they put some kind of tracker or malware in her device? She grabbed it, deciding to ask Brody about it.

Brody burst into her room as if her thoughts had conjured him up. “Jenna, we have to go now.”

She frowned at him. “I’m almost finished packing. I just...”

“No, you don’t understand. This house is being watched. I saw them but they drove away before I could see them clearly. I’ve already told Officer Green we need to go before whoever’s watching the house comes back.”

Her blood froze in her veins. “If someone’s following me, I can’t go to Carly’s house.”

“I know. we’ll figure it out, but we need to leave now.” He took her bag and started down the hall.

She moved quickly to keep pace with his long strides.

“What do we do?”

Officer Green met them in the front room.

Brody nodded to the layman. “Officer Green is going to follow us back to the station, but we can’t wait around.”

Jenna’s lips trembled. She pressed them together. In less than twelve hours, her entire life had turned around. Would it ever get back to normal?

She thought about her unknown grandmother. Then her new niece or nephew.

A sudden chill swept up her spine. If they didn’t figure out who was after her soon, would she survive to meet the new baby?

CHAPTER 5

Brody reached for Jenna’s hand when she picked her key fob off the table next to the front door.

He waited until she jerked her gaze up to meet his. He’d startled her. Hadn’t meant to do that. “We’ll take my car. If this person has been watching you, he knows your car and maybe had a chance to put a tracker on it.”

She paled, then dropped her fob on the table like it was a live viper in her grasp. “If he’s been watching the house, how do we know he didn’t do that with your vehicle?”

Fair question. “I have alarms installed. No one is touching my SUV without my knowledge.”

He’d learned the necessity of that the hard way when the murderous spouse of a former client attempted to ambush him by hiding in his backseat. The man had been too large to completely hide and Brody had seen movement a few feet from the car.

The very next day, he had alarms installed. Never again would someone get the drop on him in his own car.