Page 85 of Family Bonds- Jarrett & Andi

“Funny, don’t you think?” Mac asked.

“Which is why he’s still watched. Or if he does have contact with them, it’s pretty benign. You know as well as I do you need to build a case on these things.”

“We do,” he said. “Deep down, do you feel Andi isn’t in danger?”

“I’d tell you if she was,” Jack said. “She isn’t.”

“I think the bigger danger is Jack right now,” Mac said. “When he talks with Andi and has to explain this. It’s adding to your guilt, isn’t it? You pushed for her to go into Witness Protection. Maybe you jumped the gun and could have just had her go away while she recovered?”

Jack sat in a chair. “I have to live with those choices. I have to figure out what to tell Andi too. At the time, it was the right choice. Looking back, I’m not sure if I would have done anything differently to protect her.”

“He was put in a bad position,” Mac said when they left the hotel. “I’m not positive what I would have done in his shoes.”

“Not what he did,” he said.

“I wouldn’t have lied or set up a false threat. He put his job on the line and got away with it. But he does have to live with how Andi’s life turned out. She has to live with it,” Mac said. “Can you?”

“I can,” he said. “I’ll make sure I’ll be there for her when she needs me too. And I won’t be the one to make her feel as she did yesterday.”

27

SECRETS FROM HER PAST

“Thanks for coming over,” Andi said to Jack on Friday. “How much longer are you here?”

“This weekend,” Jack said. “Not sure yet. I won’t go until you and I are okay.”

“I’m not sure what okay is anymore,” she said.

It’d been a hard couple of days for her to learn what she had.

She knew that Jarrett had gone over with his brother to talk to Jack too but didn’t ask about what. She wasn’t sure she needed to know and if she did, she’d ask Jack herself.

“I’m sorry about that,” Jack said. “No one could have predicted things would have turned out the way they had.”

“Why would you put your career at risk to get me out of there?” she asked. “I believed I was in danger and now it sounds like that wasn’t the case.”

“Hey,” Jack said. “You knew a few months after that the threat had never been verified.”

“Don’t play those games. It wasn’t verified or credible because you knew what you were doing. You made me think that even though Winston’s nephew was in custody he was somehowcalling the shots still. Or someone else was. It should have been over with then.”

“You know why we got you out,” Jack said.

“Leo. I get it. I panicked. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. I was still processing the loss of my father, then to overhear what Idid. I could have not heard correctly. But you asked me if I was feeling unsafe and then ran with it.”

She wondered if she just stayed what would have happened. She would have broken up with Leo and just gone on her merry way and been done.

There was no going back though and she couldn’t dwell on that.

“Your father would have wanted that,” Jack said. “I couldn’t take a risk. There were too many factors in play and none of them I had any control over. I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to you.”

Andi could see the sincerity in his eyes. “You’re living with enough guilt,” she said. “I don’t want to add to it. It’s just hard.”

He’d been sitting in the chair while she was on the couch in her living room. The same positions they were in a few days ago when she found out more secrets from her past.

He got up and pulled her into his arms and hugged her. “I know it is. I’m sorry. If I could change anything I would. I don’t do well with women. You know that.”

She laughed. “Don’t pull that on me. You made your choices with Sarah, but don’t project them onto me.”

---