Jodie Bailey - Hidden Twin

“Did you ever talk to anyone about your husband?” Sam winced as soon as the question left his lips. Seriously. There was making conversation and there was prying into places he had no business digging. Keeping his mouth shut would have been the better option.

There was something about this woman though, something that made him feel as if he knew her better than he did. Maybe it was because he’d spent time with her when Edgecombe checked in on her. Maybe it was the way she’d opened up to him earlier in the day. Or maybe it was simply who she was. Amy was different than any other woman he’d ever encountered, on the job or off.

She was definitely different than his ex-wife.

“My husband?” Her voice had a hazy edge to it, as though his question had drawn her from somewhere far away.

“Never mind.”

She stared out the side window and said nothing for a couple of miles. “No. I didn’t.”

So she had caught the question after all. “Was there a reason you didn’t?”

“I talked to my sister. I never saw the need to say anything to anyone else. It hurt when Noah died. I lost him, my future, everything. Even the apartment I was living in, my car...”

That couldn’t be right. The soldier in Sam remembered all of the paperwork he’d had to fill out prior to a deployment. Points of contact for notifications, burial instructions, beneficiaries for life insurance... The whole morbid list was as long as his arm. Things no one wanted to think about when they were headed into a war zone but things that had to be squared away to ensure the protection of their loved ones at home before they could go wheels up to do their jobs. “How is that possible? You should have been taken care of. There should have been so much available to you.” There it was. Another way too personal comment he never should have made.

Amy shook her head, her blond hair spilling over her shoulder and swishing against her cheek. She tucked it behind her ear. “We got married so fast. He never changed his paperwork. I guess he never expected to die. Who does?”

Sam’s heart sank. As a single soldier, all of his benefits had been directed to his mother and father. Amy’s Noah had likely done the same in his single life. And if their marriage had happened on a timeline as tight as the one she’d indicated, he’d already filled out his deployment paperwork and had likely not even considered the consequences of not changing beneficiaries.

She was right. What man wanted to consider his death, especially when he was trying to cram in as much living as possible with a brand-new wife?

“I wasn’t even his primary notification on his paperwork. I found out what happened to him because one of the chaplains in the battalion knew me. His parents got the notification. I heard secondhand. I’d never met his family. They lived in Puerto Rico.” She sniffed, then swallowed and turned away from him. “I didn’t even have the money to fly to San Juan for my own husband’s funeral. I’ve never even seen his grave.”

Sam’s heart shattered. He gripped the steering wheel tighter to keep from reaching for her hand, which would have been a decidedly unprofessional move. When she said she’d lost everything, she wasn’t exaggerating. Had she even felt she had the right to grieve?

For long miles, he didn’t know what to say, how to soothe the ache she was bound to feel at her husband’s death and his family’s slight. The woman beside him was stronger than he’d imagined. “So you never talked to anyone except your sister?” It was the best he had to offer, and it was completely lame.

She didn’t seem to notice. “I didn’t want to fight his family, because I figured they had even less than I did. And nothing was going to bring him back to me, so why bother talking to someone about it? It was going to hurt no matter what.”

“And yet you minored in psychology.”

She cast him a rueful glance, her eyebrow quirked. “That was in my file too?”

At least she was somewhat smiling. It was better than heated anger or chilled silence. “Yep.”

“WITSEC wouldn’t let me do anything that even remotely smelled like my career goals or the work I was doing at the gym to pay my way through college. Truth is, I had enough biology to be able to teach at the community college level since I studied sports medicine. I was accepted to grad school so I could become a physical therapist and work with athletes. A psychology minor made sense so I could dig into a bit of how the mind works so that I could figure out what made an athlete tick, could help them recover from an injury in body and in mind, maybe even in spirit.”

“That sounds kind of New Age.”

“Far from it. It sounds like Jesus. A lot of athletes who are injured, especially at the levels I was shooting for, have their whole lives change when they’re injured. Entire careers get derailed. Dreams die. There are psychologists and counselors for that sort of thing, but I know a lot of people talk to their physical therapists and open up more on the table than while sitting on a couch in a counseling session. I figured I should know something about how to help someone whose world has been completely rocked and their dreams shattered in a way they never saw coming.” She trailed off and ran a finger along the stitching in the seat between them. “I never realized when I was taking all of those classes that all those things I learned would apply to me someday. Or that I’d never get to use my real training. I got to gather up all of my knowledge and teach instead.”

“Has teaching been that bad?”

“I’ve actually enjoyed it, but I miss me. I miss having goals and plans and dreams. It’s been three years and I’ve never figured out what I want to do with this new life. Good thing, since it’s gone now too.” She pulled her hand into her lap and balled her fists between her knees. “Maybe that’s why I never came up with a new dream, because some part of me always knew this day would come and it would all be snatched away again.”

“I’m sorry.” He truly was. Somehow, this whole detour in her life felt like his fault.

“Thanks, but you’re trying to protect me. This is Grant Meyer’s fault. All the more reason to see him locked away forever.”

Sam exhaled a breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. Sometimes, when things got too heated, a witness would back down and decide not to testify. While Amy had turned over enough evidence to condemn Meyer without her testimony, federal prosecutors needed her to be willing to testify if any questions came up about those documents and how she’d obtained them.

“I have no regrets about my decision to turn my boss over to the authorities. A lot of people were freed from a terrible man’s clutches.” Her expression turned pensive, and she fingered the antique watch on her wrist. The leather band was scratched and worn, and the crystal over the gold face bore a small crack near the bezel. “I just hope they got far enough.”

“There something special about that watch?”

Amy blanched, her cheeks going pale as she laid her hand over the watch’s face as though she could hide it and possibly even erase it from Sam’s memory completely.

Something was very wrong here. He’d merely asked because the way she absently ran a finger across it made it appear to be some sort of security blanket. He’d thought it might have belonged to her husband or someone in her husband’s family. Now, his radar pinged on high.

Innocent people didn’t have things to hide. The way she was protecting that timepiece, there was no doubt...

Amy Brady was hiding something big.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».