Outside past the gate, I see what’s behind the familiar noise—it’s the media. I feel like they’re right outside my window even though they’re stationed a little ways back thanks to the police barrier going into place.
They found me. How did they find me? I’ve barely been a resident for twenty-four hours, and already they’re here, ready with their scalpels and bone saws to dissect me, piece by bloody piece.
I won’t be able to leave my apartment without passing them. I won’t be able to do anything outside of this one-thousand-square-foot space without them seeing it or following me or documenting it.
My heart drops all the way into its grave six feet under. Torrin.
Do they know he’s here? They can’t. But they will. Soon. If I don’t figure out something.
I’m thinking of ways to get him out of here, avenues for him to escape through as I stumble down the hall.
He knows something’s wrong before I face him. His expression goes from serene to troubled in half a blink of my eyes. “What is it?”
I freeze-frame this moment and archive it at the front of my memory. This moment can’t last, but the memory of it can. “They’re here.”
He doesn’t ask who. He doesn’t ask how many. He doesn’t ask where. His expression creases as he throws off the sheets and jumps out of my bed. “Good. I’ve got a confession to make.”
The way he says it, the way he powers past me . . . I know. What’s he about to do and what he’s going to say.
“Torrin, don’t.” I jog after him, panic digging its claws into my throat.
“They want a story? I’ll give them a story.”
The muscles of his back are tense, and as I follow him, I realize there are so many more parts of him I haven’t seen. So many lines and grooves and dips I want to touch and explore. I could spend one full night acquainting myself with each of them.
That will have to wait though because what I want and what’s best for him are two opposite things.
“No, stop.” When he’s reaching for the door, I lunge forward and grab his wrist. It stops him. Momentarily. “People look at me and see a man—Earl Rae Jackson.” When I say his name, Torrin’s jaw locks. “They see what he did and judge him and cross their fingers they’ll never run into someone like him someday.” I pause to catch my breath. “I don’t want the world to look at me and see Father Costigan, because you know that’s what will happen.” I slowly come around in front of him, putting myself between him and the door. “You go out there and start shouting about the way things are between us, shirtless at seven on a Saturday morning, and that will not put an end to anything.” I grab his other wrist and step into him. I don’t look away. I don’t stutter. I just keep telling him the hard truth. “It’s only going to be the start of a long, painful process where in the end, we’ll both come out looking like we swim in the same cesspool of morality as the Earl Raes of the world. I can’t do that to you. Please don’t ask me to.”
Torrin’s eyes cut to the door. His chest is moving as fast as it did during certain parts last night. He’s so torn I can see it about to split him down the middle. “Do you think that’s what I want for you? Another reason for the media to not leave you alone?” The muscles banding down his neck break to the surface. “But I don’t know what to do anymore. They won’t leave you alone. But the thing is . . .” He exhales and lowers his hand around my back. “I can’t leave you alone either. I don’t want to keep pretending we’re old friends. I don’t want to keep sneaking in through dark windows and doors. I don’t want to keep pretending, Jade. It’s killing me.”
The heat from his hand is already coming through my shirt, seeping into my skin, spreading to my head and messing with my sense of reasoning. I squeeze my eyes closed and try to concentrate. “I know. It’s doing the same thing to me, but they aren’t going to leave us alone just because you ask them to. It’ll get worse. Every kiss, every touch, every private moment . . . they’ll find a way to take those from us, to twist them into something ugly and shameful. I can’t let them do that to us. I can’t let them corrupt what we have.”
“Then what are we supposed to do?” His wrist twists in my hand to free itself. He lifts it to slide my hair behind my ear.
I stare at the door, my stomach knotting when I think about what’s waiting. It’s not just the media I’m afraid of. “I know they’re not going away until I tell my story, and I can’t tell my story until I know what that story is. I need time to figure it out. And I won’t drag you into this mess while I’m taking my time and trying to put myself back together.”
His forehead lowers to mine, and our eyes close. “And what if I want to be dragged into it?”
“I’d ask you—beg you—not to.”
He exhales. “Why?”
I don’t pull back, but I open my eyes. His are already open. “Because that’s a choice I want us to make when the time’s right. I don’t want us to be forced into making that choice.”
“No one’s forcing me to do anything.”
My hands form around the sides of his neck. “No, but if you do this, you’re forcing me.”
That gets his attention. The creases iron out of his forehead, and the anger rolling through his eyes fades away.
“Look at me, Torrin.” I step back so he can, and I hold my arms at my sides. He looks at me, but I don’t think he sees what I do when I look in the mirror. “I was reintroduced to the world weeks ago after years of being away from it. The smallest, most insignificant things send me into a tailspin. I have flashbacks and nightmares and images in my head that would traumatize a sadist.” I pause, remembering why I’m saying this. Why this is so important to me. Him. He’s important. He deserves the best and the most, and until I can give that to him, I can’t do this. “I need to get myself right so I don’t do this—us—wrong. I’d be a fool to think I can just get over this or move on or get back to my old life. It’s going to take time. I’m going to need time. Can you give me that?”
I’ve only seen Torrin cry once, and that was the day I found him camped out on his front steps when everyone else was inside after his dad’s funeral. I didn’t say anything when I walked up to him that day. I just sat down beside him, wound an arm around him, and let him cry.
This is the closest to crying I’ve seen him since then.
Like that gray afternoon on his front steps fifteen years ago, he doesn’t say anything. He just closes the space between us, wraps his arms around me one at a time, and draws me close. His head tucks mine against him, and he holds me for an eternity. At least the only kind of eternity Torrin Costigan and I can have.
The finite kind.
“What am I supposed to do?” His voice is hoarse like someone’s been choking him.
“Go back to being a priest. Unsuspend yourself. Be that light. Be wonderful and infectious and compassionate and all the things that drew me to you.” I lean back and look up at him. I have to say good-bye, but at least this time I get to say it. “Go be you. And I’ll try to figure out who I am while you’re doing that.”
His arms slide away from me and fall heavily at his sides. He manages a smile because I think he knows that a frown will kill me “Anything else?”
I smile back because I think a frown would kill him too. “Yeah.” I tip my chin down the hall. Away from the media. Away from the storm. “Take the back door.”
He manages a tiny laugh, and I know how lucky I am to have this as my last memory of him. Shirtless, doused in sunlight, his smile eclipsing into a laugh. I’ve lived a full life, and I’m not even thirty. Whatever comes next, I’m prepared to accept it.
As he turns to go, I grab him just before he gets away. “And one more thing.”
Then I kiss him good-bye.
“THANK YOU FOR taking the time to sit down and go over a few last details.” Detective Reyes closes the folder in front of her. “I know this has been a trying process for you.”
A week after my night with Torrin, Detective Reyes called
to ask if I’d be open to going over my case again. I agreed, but not without setting the date out as far as I thought I could push it without pressing my luck. The week between her call and today went faster than I would have liked.
“No problem. Thank you for all of your patience.”
“Well, the police couldn’t manage to find you for ten years.” She leans back in her chair looking like she’s trying to get comfortable, but she doesn’t seem like the kind of person who could ever just get comfortable. “Waiting a couple weeks for the rest of your story was really the least we could do.”
I smile because she’s making a joke, and I’m getting better with conditioned responses. I’m relearning at the pace of a turtle with three broken legs, but at least I’m moving forward.
Detective Reyes offered to drive to my place to go over the last few things, but I told her I’d meet her at the station. It’s a small thing that feels like a big one. When we first settled at her desk to talk, I felt everyone watching me. I suppose most of them were involved in my case either at the beginning, the end, or both, and all of them are familiar with my dad, so I should have been ready for the stares.
Reyes must have picked up on my discomfort because she didn’t ask if I wanted to move; she just stood and waved me back down a hall. She offered either a break room or an interrogation room, and I went with the interrogation room.
The interview took less time than I’d expected, making me wonder why we couldn’t have just gone over her handful of questions on the phone.
As I start to push my chair back from the table, Reyes lifts her pen. The file stays closed. “Real quick—there was a solar panel salesman who came to Earl Rae’s house two days before your rescue. Do you remember that?”
I have to dig around in my head for a moment because I’ve been working on replacing those memories with the new ones I’m making. I don’t have to dig long because I haven’t managed to bury them very deep yet. “Yeah, I do.”
“You saw him?”
My eyebrows come together. “No, Earl Rae put me in the closet. He always did when anyone showed up at the house.” I know I’ve mentioned that before, so I’m surprised she’s asking.
“So you never saw the salesman?” She spins the pen between her fingers. “Was there any way he could have seen you?”
Unless he had Superman X-ray vision? “No. And no.”
Reyes nods and continues. “The black Converse you were kidnapped in. They had little hearts you’d penned onto the rubber toe?”
I nod.
“Where did those go?” she asks.
My favorite pair of shoes. I still miss them . . . and it wasn’t me who penned those black hearts on the toes—it was Torrin. “That was all gone when I woke up. I was wearing something else. He told me he’d burned it all.”
Reyes’s expression is flat, but that pen keeps spinning slow circles in her fingers like she’s working out something. “So those shoes couldn’t have been lying around the living room right around the time you were rescued?”
“No. No way.”
She makes a sound like she’s stumped and trying to work through a problem that won’t add up. She’s not really looking at me—she’s watching the twirling pen.
“Okay, so weird string of questions.” I curl my sweater more tightly around me because it’s cold in this room. Something about what I can almost feel Reyes is working out is making me cold too. “Why are you asking?”
She keeps watching the pen, and I start to feel like I’m twirling around the room with it. “Well, that solar panel salesman?” Her head shakes once. “He wasn’t exactly a salesman.”
My lungs go limp right before they feel like they’re about to burst. “Oh my god . . . it was him. Wasn’t it?”
She doesn’t nod, because she knows I don’t need a confirmation. I know it was him.
“After telling us what he remembered about Earl Rae at the gas station, he wasn’t happy that things weren’t moving at lightning speed, and we weren’t breaking down doors that day, so he decided to track down Earl Rae. On his own. Without telling us,” Reyes grumbles. “When he told us about his little covert op, he said that he’d caught a glimpse of you in the hall—along with your shoes in the front room. Two days later, we were breaking down that door.” Reyes looks at me. “That’s how we found you.”
I feel a lot of things right then. Mostly I’m just kind of overwhelmed from learning that it was him—he was that close—and that I might still be on the end of that chain of it wasn’t for him. But I also feel worry. This feeling grows as the other recedes. He lied. To the police. I know that’s never a good thing, and in certain cases, it’s a crime. I’m going to guess a lie about seeing a missing girl that resulted in the police assembling a couple dozen people to storm a house would fall into that category.
I stare at the table, hoping I’ll sound as convincing as I have to be. “You know, maybe he could have seen me. It took Earl Rae a little while to get me in the closet, and he could have seen me then.” I swallow and keep going. He’s saved me in so many ways—I have to get this right. I have to save him now. “And Earl Rae could have been lying about burning all my stuff. It’s not like I was ever able to confirm it.”
Reyes is silent for so long my hands start to shake. Why didn’t Torrin tell me? Why didn’t he tell me so I could change my story? Why didn’t he tell me? That’s the question that keeps playing through my head, but I guess the simple answer is that he didn’t tell me because he didn’t want to. For whatever reason—be it he didn’t want me to know or he didn’t want me to lie for him or he didn’t think it was that big of a deal—he didn’t tell me. That’s enough for me to accept.
“But he didn’t see you. Earl Rae had every single window in that house boarded up.” Reyes lets the spinning pen fall from her fingers. When it hits the table, it makes a sharp sound that echoes around the room. “And your shoes are ashes that blew into the wind years ago.”
I stare at the folder and wonder why it’s still closed. Why she isn’t making notes like she was earlier. “He found me.” I lean forward in my chair. “Does how he did it matter?”
“Well”—Reyes shrugs—“only if you believe in things like the law, and telling the truth, and not perjuring yourself in order to get a SWAT team to pound down the door of some guy you remembered saying something creepy to your girlfriend ten years ago.”
God, she makes that sound bad. He isn’t just someone who lied either—he’s a priest who lied. That would make it a hundred times worse if this were released.
“Please, don’t,” I say, but my tone is more reminiscent of begging. “He saw me. I remember.”
Reyes lifts her hands as I start to warm up. “Jade, it’s okay.” She keeps them lifted for another second before setting them down. “I knew Torrin was lying when he came barreling in here, ordering every man in the department load up and show up at Earl Rae’s house.”
I blink at her. “You knew? How?”
Reyes checks the cameras stationed in the room. She told me they weren’t rolling or anything since this was a courtesy interview and not an official interrogation, but I get the feeling she’s double-checking because she doesn’t want what she’s about to say filmed.
“I didn’t work your case at the beginning.” Her gaze shifts from the cameras. “I didn’t get it until recently, but I know the detectives who worked it after you went missing. They told me all about Torrin Costigan and how during that first year, he was in here every day looking for an update or delivering one himself. He called them on their days off and called them even after they retired. He didn’t know the meaning of giving up.” Reyes slides the folder down the table. “That kind of person does not get a glimpse of the girl he’s been looking for for ten years and turn around and walk away. Torrin Costigan wouldn’t catch a glimpse of a shadow of you in a hall, or see your old shoes or a strand of hair he suspected was yours, and let the door close in his face, walk down the front porch steps, and wait two days
for you to be rescued.”
Reyes pauses like she’s waiting for a confirmation from me, but I’m not opening my mouth and saying anything else that could get him in trouble.
“If Torrin Costigan saw you that day, nothing would have stopped him from bringing you home. And yeah, we might have found Earl Rae’s body one day, but the bullet in his head wouldn’t have been from his own doing.”
I shift in my seat, unable to find a comfortable position anymore. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
Reyes shrugs. “Because he was right. You were there.”
“He never told me . . . my dad, he never even told me. I had no idea.” My head feels thick with confusion. “Why didn’t they tell me?”
Reyes’s eyes narrow a little as they glance at the door. “Your dad doesn’t know. As far as the official report goes, it was an anonymous tipster who gave us what we needed to find you.”
My eyes widen, but I stay quiet because even though my first instinct is to assume Dad would go bad cop all over this place if he ever found out, I remember something he’s been telling me my whole life—he’s a dad first and a cop second. I was home—the how that went into that wouldn’t matter much to him.
“And as for why Torrin hasn’t told you or anyone that he was the one responsible for bringing you home, I think it’s because he doesn’t want the notoriety or the recognition or anything that comes with that. All he wanted was to find you. All he cared about was bringing you home.”
I have to bite my lip to keep from crying. He found me. He didn’t just look for me. He didn’t just keep believing. He found me.
He failed better until he got it right.
Those ten years I thought I was so very alone, I really wasn’t. He was still there, looking. Searching. Finding. That tether might have stretched and pulled and neared its breaking point, but he never let go. He was with me then too.
“Listen,” Reyes says, “I didn’t tell you any of this at first because I knew you had enough coming at you. I wasn’t going to tell you at all because it doesn’t change anything about who he is and who you are.”