Silent Run(101)
Jake lifted his gaze to hers, but his expression was completely unreadable when he said, “We’ll never know, will we?”
“No, we won’t. But while I lied to you about my past, I never lied about my feelings. I was happy with you, the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. And I didn’t want it to end, but it did. Because nothing good lasts forever.”
“Nothing good built on a lie lasts forever,” Jake corrected. “If you don’t have a strong foundation, your house falls down. That’s what happened to us. And I have to take some of the blame, because I never called you on any of the lies you told me. I never made you answer my questions. I’m a detail person in my work, but in my personal life I saw only the big picture. But you’re free now, Sarah. Victor is dead. Just about everyone else in his group is dead. You don’t have to be afraid anymore. You don’t have to lie. You can be yourself.”
“I’m not sure who I am anymore,” she confessed. “I’ve been so many people and answered to so many names. I don’t feel like Jessica or Samantha. I feel more like Sarah, but I made up that name, too.”
“If you want to be Sarah, be Sarah. It’s not your name that’s important. It’s who you are. It’s living a life of truth. A life without fear.”
She wondered if that was possible. “I’ve been scared for so long,” she said. “I can’t imagine going to bed at night and not having to worry about whether or not Victor is going to come after me. It’s hard to believe he’s dead.”
“You looked at him. You saw him.”
“I had to be sure, see him with my own eyes. It was still difficult to grasp.”
“Now you can go on with your life.”
“How?” she whispered. “How do I do that without you—without Caitlyn—because that’s the way you want it to be, isn’t it?”
Jake didn’t answer for a long time. There was an expression in his eyes she couldn’t decipher. “I don’t know yet, Sarah.”
Her heart sank. “I can’t give up my child, Jake.”
“I need some time to think about the future.”
“How much time?”
“As much time as it takes,” he said shortly. “You made your choices, Sarah, and I had to live with them. Now it’s my turn. Right now I’d like to be alone with Caitlyn.”
Sarah hesitated and then leaned over and kissed her daughter on the forehead. She rose from the bed and walked out of the room. After what she’d put Jake through, she owed him this night—but the rest would be a battle.
Chapter Twenty-three
Sarah paused in the doorway to the living room where Catherine and Teresa were eating pizza and catching up on their lives. As usual their conversation jumped back and forth between topics, Teresa eager to express each and every opinion in her head and Catherine trying to get a word in edgewise.
Listening to them took Sarah back to the past, when they’d gathered on Catherine’s bed late at night and talked about what they were going to do when they grew up. Teresa had wanted to be an astronaut. Catherine had always wanted to be a painter. And when Sarah had seen her own future, she’d always pictured herself with a bunch of kids. The other girls had teased her about having no ambition, but creating a family had always been her dream. Neither Teresa nor Catherine had ever been part of a real family, at least not for any length of time. Teresa had been taken away from her single mother when she was two and didn’t remember anyone. Catherine had never told them when or why she’d been taken from her parents, but Sarah had always known that something bad had happened. There was a dark sadness to Catherine that she couldn’t quite hide, but she’d always refused to talk about her past.
Since Sarah had spent most of her life hiding her own history, she could hardly quarrel with Cather-ine’s decision just to keep moving forward. Sometimes there was no point to looking back. Her big mistake had been to lie. She shouldn’t have tried to be someone else. She should have had more confidence in herself.
“There you are,” Teresa said, spotting her in the doorway. “Get in here, for God’s sake. Are you all right? What did the cops say?”
Sarah moved into the room and sat down on the couch next to Catherine. “I have to go back in the morning to talk to some more people, but the bottom line is that I don’t think any of us are going to be charged in Victor’s death. The police seem to believe it was self-defense, and Rick has been talking about the other murders that Victor was involved in, so my fingers are crossed that it will be all right. I hope so, anyway. I certainly don’t want to see Jake arrested for murder when all he did was try to protect me, nor do I want to go to jail. But I would rather it be me than anyone else.” She paused. “How do you feel, Teresa?” She watched Teresa take the ice pack off her head with a grimace.