Her Forgotten Betrayal(16)

“I haven’t done all that much. But if it makes you feel any better, I don’t think that bullet hole is fresh.”

“But…” She glanced at the mark. “I’ve never seen it before.”

He examined the damage more closely. He pulled a small, dark cylinder from his jeans’ pocket and clicked a switch on its barrel. It turned out to be a penlight, like something Shaw imagined a Boy Scout might carry, which he used to examine the hole once more. “Do you come in here a lot?”

“Not really.”

Not at all, actually. To Shaw, the room appeared to be a long-term storage area full of tools and old boards and other things she didn’t feel at all connected to. So she’d focused her near-obsessive cleaning efforts on the clutter elsewhere.

“Then it’s possible,” he said, “this happened years ago.”

“Who would have had a reason to shoot off a gun in my grandmother’s house?”

“Who would have a reason to shoot at you tonight?”

She shook her head. She wanted to keep shaking it, violently, until the answers she didn’t have jostled free.

He rubbed his thumb along the blemish in the plaster. “The edges aren’t rough. I’m not sure what that means, but I’m guessing over time things tend to smooth themselves out.”

Something deep inside her quivered at his statement. Would time really help her make sense of her upside-down world? It had already been three weeks. She realized how close she was to giving up on her mind ever getting better. She shoved aside the unappealing thought. She wasn’t a quitter. Not before the attack, and not now. That much she knew for certain.

She should call the number Inspector Dawson had given her in case of emergencies. But she’d feel like a fool, as she had every other time she hadn’t been able to produce proof to back up her paranoia. She didn’t want to go there tonight. For a few moments, she wanted to believe she really was as safe as she felt each time this friend she couldn’t remember touched her.

“I’ll…I’ll make the coffee,” she said to Cole. “If you wouldn’t mind—” He was a childhood pal, right? A neighbor whom her sensitive feline had taken to without hesitation, who was doing the best he could to comfort a nervous woman in the middle of the night. “Would you mind checking the rest of the doors in the house to make certain they’re locked? I know I’m being ridiculous, but sometimes I swear it feels like someone’s watching my every move.”

Cole’s gaze narrowed on her.

He clicked off his penlight. “What makes you say that?” he asked, seeming to believe her without question.

She worried her bottom lip between her teeth. “It’s just a feeling, but my feelings are all I have left of my old life. That kind of nothingness tends to make a girl pay attention to the least little things.”

“What’s going on, Shaw? Why are you up here alone, terrified of your own shadow and thinking someone’s trying to kill you? Why don’t you recognize me?”

She wrapped her arms around her waist, making the decision that she was done keeping everything to herself, hang what her doctors and Dawson thought was best for her. All their helpful recommendations had achieved so far was her making herself even more of a candidate for a straightjacket. It was time to experiment with alternative solutions, even if it meant breaking the rules.

“Why? Because someone did try to kill me.” She lifted her bangs to show Cole her scar. “Only I can’t tell you who, any more than I can remember you. Or myself and my cat. Or this house, the beautiful mountains around us, my life before here, or even my grandmother, who was supposedly like a mother to me until she died. The only thing that feels real is the irrational belief that if something doesn’t come back to me soon, whoever did this to me is going to try to kill me again. And this time I’m going to die.”

…

Cole warred with the conflicting impulses either to pull Shaw close once more, or to hit the road.

The scope of his assignment was shifting precariously, even if the rest of his team didn’t know it yet. As unexpected as his confrontation with Shaw in the woods had been, it was already producing some enticing results. If she kept trusting him, and if he got over his aversion to being back in this damn house and applied himself to calming and soothing her the way his instincts still screamed for him to, they might accomplish together what she hadn’t been able to on her own.

Would his presence be the catalyst that would finally get her to remember, without an interrogator resorting to forcing her, as the Bureau intended to do?