Twelve
Her mind drowning in a cesspool of memories, Natalie scrambled into her clothes and had to ask for directions several times before she emerged from the maze of saunas and massage rooms.
Dom waited at the entrance to the women’s changing rooms instead of at the car. His face was tight with concern and unspoken questions when she emerged. He swept a sharp glance around the hall, as though checking to see if anyone lingered nearby or appeared to be waiting or watching for Natalie, then cut his gaze back to her.
“What happened in the changing area to turn your face so pale?”
“I remembered something.”
“About Janos Lagy?”
“No.” She gnawed on her lower lip. “An incident in my past. I need to tell you about it.”
Something flickered in his eyes. Surprise? Caution? Wariness? It came and went so quickly she couldn’t have pinned a label on it even if her thoughts weren’t skittering all over the place.
“There’s a café across the street. We can talk there.”
“A café? I don’t think… I don’t know…”
“We haven’t eaten since breakfast. Whatever you have to tell me will go down easier with a bowl of goulash.”
Natalie knew nothing could make it go down easier, but she accompanied him out of the hotel and into the fall dusk. Lights had begun to glow on the Pest side of the Danube. She barely registered the glorious panorama of gold and indigo as Dom took her arm and steered her to the brightly lit café.
Soon—too soon for her mounting dread—they were enclosed in a high-backed booth that afforded both privacy and an unimpeded view of the illuminated majesty across the river. Dom ordered and signaled for her to wait until the server had brought them both coffee and a basket of thick black bread. He cut Natalie’s coffee with a generous helping of milk to suit her American taste buds, then nudged the cup across the table.
“Take a drink, take a breath and tell me what has you so upset.”
She complied with the first two instructions but couldn’t find a way to broach the third. She stirred more milk into her coffee, fiddled with her spoon, gnawed on her lower lip again.
“Natalie. Tell me.”
Her eyes lifted to his. “The scum you hunt down? The thieves and con artists and other criminals?” Misery choked her voice. “I’m one of them.”
She’d dreaded his reaction. Anticipated his disgust or icy withdrawal. The fact that he didn’t even blink at the anguished confession threw her off for a moment. But only a moment.
“Oh, my God! You know?” Shame coursed through her, followed almost immediately by a scorching realization. “Of course you do! You’ve known all along, haven’t you?”
“Not all along, and not the details.” His calm, even tone countered the near hysteria in hers. “Only that you were arrested, the charges were later dropped and the record wiped clean.”
Her laugh was short and bitter. “Not clean enough, apparently.”
The server arrived then with their goulash. The brief interruption didn’t give her nearly enough time to swallow the fact that Dom had been privy to her deepest, darkest, most mortifying secret. The server departed, but the steaming soup sat untouched while Natalie related the rest of her sorry tale.
“I’m not sure how much you know about me, but before Sarah hired me I worked for the State of Illinois. Specifically, for the state’s Civil Service Board. I was part of an ongoing project to digitize more than a hundred years’ worth of paper files and merge them with current electronic records. I enjoyed the work. It was such a challenge putting all those old records into a sortable database.”
She really had loved her job, she remembered as she plucked a slice of coarse black bread from the basket and played with it. Not just the digitizing and merging and sorting, but the picture those old personnel records painted of previous generations. Their work ethic, their frugal saving habits, their large numbers of dependents and generous contributions to church and charity. For someone like Natalie with no parents or grandparents or any known family, these glimpses into the quintessential American working family were fascinating.
“Then,” she said with a long, slow, thoroughly disgusted sigh, “I fell in love.”
She tore a thick piece off the bread, squeezed it into a wad, rolled it around and around between her fingers.
“He was so good-looking,” she said miserably. “Tall, athletic, blue-eyed, always smiling.”
“Always smiling? Sounds like a jerk.”
Her lips twisted. “I was the jerk. I bought his line about wanting to settle down and start a family. Actually started weaving fantasies about a nursery, a minivan with car seats, the whole baby scene. I should’ve known I wasn’t the type to interest someone as smooth and sophisticated as Jason DeWitt for longer than it took for him to hack into my computer.”