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“Sure.” Using her hands, she drew circles to detect any irregularities but found the wall’s construction solid. Crouching on the floor, she scanned the wall from the baseboard all the way up toward the ceiling. “Nothing.”
“Let’s move this hay,” Mark said.
They stored away the remaining hay bales before continuing to search.
Growing tense with anticipation, Tess kneeled to examine another space where the wall met the floor. One foot up, she detected a tiny ripple in the drywall. “Come feel this. Can you chisel this out?”
Nodding, Mark grabbed her pocketknife and got to work. “Will you keep watch?”
“Of course.” Perched on a hay bale, she spied out the barred window. Observing his progress carving the drywall from the ripple, she wedged a block of hay in front of him to hide the growing hole from view, should their captors return.
“One board’s bigger than the others. Hope this is it.” He chose the knife’s widest blade and cut around the swell in straight, surgical lines. “Quality knife. Sharp blade helps.”
“Never used it before. My fiancé gave it to me as a good luck travel charm.” She watched as he finished outlining the swollen board.
Pausing to wipe sweat off his forehead, he turned and offered her a small smile. “Well, lucky for us, you carried it on this trip. When’s your wedding?”
Icy water, then nothing. In a split second, grief managed to find her, even in this remote barn. A gasping sound escaped her throat, and tears dampened her cheeks before she could swipe them away. Attempts to outrun Kyle’s loss by crisscrossing the globe had failed. Numbing her pain with vodka and copious amounts of denial also proved useless.
“Tess?” Mark edged closer. “What’s wrong?”
“No wedding. Kyle was killed a year ago yesterday.” She dug a fingernail deep into her hand, intent on creating enough physical discomfort to offset her emotional pain. Despite attempting to keep her voice measured and even, it still broke.
The pocketknife Mark held clattered to the floor, and he squatted to pick it up. “Killed? What happened?”
The empathy in his voice soothed her, but she avoided meeting his gaze for fear she’d cry even harder. Instead, she fixated on a point far beyond the barn. “Kyle and I met at Kingsley Tech. He was a software engineer, an encryption genius, and he wrote the code these criminals want to steal. Right before our wedding in London, his car smashed through a guardrail and went over a cliff into icy water. The police said he died on impact.” Her voice sounded far away, like an identical understudy was narrating her tragedy’s arc from backstage.
Tess extracted the gold chain around her neck and fingered the pendant, an elaborate Celtic knot. “Kyle was wearing this when he died. The police suspected a second car was involved, but they never found any witnesses. Even if they did, it doesn’t matter. He’s gone.”
Mark plopped onto the hay bale in front of the uncovered hole on the wall. He leaned over and rested a hand on top of hers. “I’m sorry. Trust me…the grief will heal, given time.”
The sympathetic gesture caught her off balance, and her tangled emotions of loss and anger leaked out before she could contain them. Cheeks wet with fresh tears, she turned to face him. “When they retrieved Kyle’s body from the water, he was mangled beyond recognition. Seeing him destroyed like that…broke me.” The memory of identifying Kyle’s body in a London morgue, laid flat on a metal coroner’s table, tightened her throat like a vise. Given the severe nature of his injuries, Kyle’s parents opted for cremation, then buried his ashes in a cemetery near Sevenoaks, outside London.
“Death is hell. I know firsthand.” He squeezed her hand before moving away.
“How could you understand?” Drowning in a pool of her own self-pity, she couldn’t stop herself from lashing out. “I lost everything.”
“Because I lost the two people I loved most. Life has never been the same, and it took me three years to accept they were gone.” He stepped back and pressed a fist to his lips as he shifted his gaze to the barn floor.
His admission and the painful edge to his voice gave her pause, and she softened her indignant tone. “Three years? I can’t imagine bearing this grief so long. What happened?”
“My wife, Maya, died in childbirth. Pre-eclampsia. My son, Nils, died minutes after he was born. I was shattered.” Shoulders slumped, he frowned and raised a hand to his chest.
At once, Tess recognized her own grief, and the mood in the cell darkened like a cloud had obscured the sun. She understood the sudden shock of a life stolen without warning. While not the first person in history to have lost an intimate partner, she long believed her loss hurt the most. Her empathy swelled, but she lacked the words to express how well she understood his pain. “I’m so sorry,” she said softly and clasped her hands in front of her.
“I miss them, and the life our family would’ve had together. The reality still crushes me sometimes.” He shifted his gaze toward the ceiling. “I couldn’t stand working at the hospital where they died, so I left and joined a humanitarian organization that provides medical care in war zones. I accepted a trauma surgery mission in Ukraine, right in the middle of the Crimean conflict. The loneliness followed me, but since I didn’t have time to pity myself, things got better.”
Knowing intimately how Kyle’s death gutted her, she couldn’t imagine enduring two serious losses at once. She stole a glance at Mark’s hands, which lay resting on the front edge of the hay bale. No ring. “Did you ever, well, move on?”
“Jeg har ikke bitt i gresset ennå.” He shook his head with a sad smile.
“Sorry?” She had no idea what he said.
“Ah. I meant, not yet, but I’m not eating grass.”
“Eating grass?” She wondered if he was referring to smoking marijuana, or perhaps edibles.
“I haven’t given up on life yet.” Wearing a lopsided grin, he ran a hand through his hair.
