Despite that, I pressed my back against the bench and took a deep breath and tried to act like I had my shit together.
For the next twenty minutes, I told Elizabeth half truths. I told her about the flashback, the one in the woods, because that was something she’d already know anyway. I didn’t tell her much about the Branch, only the barest of details. I made her think that I’d been out of the Branch for a few years, that I’d been piecing together my past since then. I wanted her to think she was a trivial memory on a long list of heavy shit.
I didn’t want her to know too much about me until I figured out why she’d been involved with the Branch in the first place, and why she’d been injured that night in the flashback. If I really had been sent to kill her, I needed to know why. There would have been a very good reason for it—the Branch didn’t go out of their way to kill inconsequential people.
When I was finished, Elizabeth stared at the grass glowing in the sunlight beyond the reach of the tree.
I cracked a knuckle. And another. I needed a drink.
“So this Branch,” she said, “they were the ones who took me?”
I tried to get a read on her face, tried to gauge whether or not she was playing me. Did she know why she’d been taken? Was she playing dumb to fool me?
Her eyes were squinted against the sun, her mouth relaxed, lips wet, shoulders drooped. I couldn’t read her very well, which was either an indication of my shitty-ass perception, or of her talent for hiding things.
“I don’t know for sure,” I said, “but they were involved. Especially at the end.”
What I didn’t tell her was that I’d been tasked with killing her. Me, specifically. Once I found out her name, it hadn’t taken a lot of deduction to figure out that the Target E named in my file was Elizabeth.
I didn’t plan on telling her that part. Ever. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t gone through with it. If I’d been given the order once, I could be given the order again. No matter what I told her, she’d never trust me. And I needed her to trust me.
“Was I the one who took you to the hospital when you escaped?” I asked her.
She nodded. “Yeah. You found me in the woods that night.”
“Had you been shot?”
She drew her hands into her lap and rubbed at the knuckles on her right hand, over and over again.
She was fidgeting. That I could read.
“No,” she answered. “I didn’t have any injuries.”
She was lying.
Son of a bitch.
“I could have sworn—” I started, but she cut me off.
“There was a lot of blood on me, but it wasn’t mine.”
“Oh.” I nodded, like that made sense. “I thought I was the one who shot you.”
“No,” she said quickly. “You didn’t hurt me. Ever. At all.”
I ran a hand through my hair. She had no idea how relieved I was to hear that. I’d been ordered to kill her, and I’d gone against the order. Maybe there was some humanity left in me after all.
“You still haven’t answered my first question,” she said as she pulled her hand away. “Why are you suffering from amnesia?”
“The Branch. They altered my memories. I’m trying to fill in the blanks.” Default answer. Might as well stick to it.
“They can do that?” she asked, frowning with disbelief.
“They can do a lot of things that seem improbable.”
She sat upright and angled her body toward mine. I couldn’t help but eye her, and not her face. I hadn’t considered how different she’d be from my memories. How much older she’d be.
My body was reacting in the way it always reacted when I was talking to a pretty girl. And right now I considered it a fucking traitor.
“So you came here,” she started, looking over at me, “to find me?”
I nodded.
“And now that you’ve found me?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. And that was the truth.
“Are you staying?”
That wasn’t what she wanted to ask. What she wanted to know was if I was leaving. But what I couldn’t tell was if she wanted me to.
“There are still a lot of missing pieces,” I admitted. “I don’t know why I was here in the first place. Back then.”
Partial truth. I knew the why, but why her? What threat had she posed to the Branch?
“Where are you staying?” she asked.
“Nowhere yet.”
She stood up quickly. “You’ll stay with us.”
I stood up, too, unable to hide the shock spreading across my face. “What? No. I’ll be fine.”
A woman walked past on the sidewalk, two kids trailing behind her. She was buried in her cell phone, ignoring the kids. But when she caught sight of me, she slowed and pulled the phone away from her face.