Identity Crisis(108)

Maybe she’d just take Dee’s car back home. Then maybe she would talk to her friend, the one who would know something about being brave enough to go for the happy ever after, the one who would never lie to her and never steer her wrong.

She shivered and, for the first time since she’d left Garrett’s, realized just how cold and wet she was from her mad race to and from the car in the rain. She pushed the button on the elevator and it began to ascend again. She’d just change clothes, then she’d call Dee.

It was only as she turned the key in the lock she realized that she had Garrett’s BlackBerry instead of her own, and there were at least a dozen messages, and that many missed calls and texts from her device. She smiled down at the screen. Perhaps it was fate. She’d have to get in touch with him now. Anyway, when she moved back to Portland, when her world fell apart around her, she had made herself a promise, that she’d never run away again. She’d come pretty damn close to breaking that promise just now. She was just about to send him a text when the first text from her device came up.

Kendra, don’t go to your apartment! I repeat DO NOT GO to your apartment.

You’re …

She never got to finish the text.

‘She’s at her apartment,’ Wade yelled into the phone to Garrett. She just got there. I’ve got police on the way over. And it looks like you’re about ten minutes out or so.’

‘I know! I know where I am,’ Garrett yelled back. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

‘Carla Flannery is here and her emails and text from the man match what you got.’

‘Dee and Ellis?’

‘They’re here, and Harris,’ Wade said.

Garrett white-knuckled the steering wheel and drove faster. ‘Wade, if she gets in touch with you first or anyone there, I need you, all of you, to tell her something for me.’ He didn’t wait for Wade’s response, but ploughed on. ‘Tell her I love her.’ He ignored Wade’s uncomfortable sputterings at the other end of the phone and continued, ‘Make her listen, Wade. Make her listen and don’t let her be afraid. There’s no reason to be afraid. Tell her I need her to know. Tell her that, and the very second I see her again I’ll tell her in person.’

He disconnected and tried to breathe around the tightness in his chest. He wished to God he had ignored Don and marched right out into the rain after her. How could he have let this happen? Hadn’t he loved her almost from the beginning? He just didn’t want it to be her; he just didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. And now, there was no one in the world he wanted to love but her, now there was no one else he wanted to give that satisfaction to. He couldn’t lose her. He couldn’t! He’d waited his whole life for Kendra Davis and he would do whatever he had to do to have her safe and sound and back in his arms.

He hadn’t expected her or he wouldn’t have lingered. But when the key turned in the lock, when he knew the inevitable was about to happen, everything in him went calm. It was fate, wasn’t it? Fate had delivered her into his hands early, a reward for all of his patience, for all of his hard work.

She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at her cell phone. He was slightly out of her line of sight, still sitting in front of her laptop where he had been gorging on everything he could possibly discover about Kendra Davis – not the reinvented one, not the one pretending to be someone else, but the real one, the genuine article, the woman beneath all those layers, and oh, how he had longed to know her, to uncover her, to lay her bare to her very core.

And this, this was that magical moment, that split second in time before the world changed forever. This was the tipping point. She still didn’t know he was there. She still thought she was alone and safe, and because of that, she was still so completely, so exquisitely at her ease that he wished he could freeze-frame the moment, he wished he could somehow capture it for posterity, so that he could bring it back and relive it time and time again long after he was finished with her.

But of course it couldn’t last; the second would pass, and soon enough she would know. He watched with his heart in his throat, he waited for that instant when she knew. And when it happened it was a subtle thing, so minute at first that he almost didn’t catch it, so miniscule the change that he sat frozen on the edge of the seat, not even daring to breathe, sat until his eyes burned from not blinking. And then he saw it; her agile fingers on the BlackBerry faltered. Her shoulders tensed. She sniffed and caught her breath. Her eyelids fluttered and her lovely full lips parted in a little gasp of surprise, as though she had just remembered something – something terrible.