Page 80 of Dear John

“Ready?” Hudson asked, his eyes lingering just a tad longer than usual on me.

“Yep,” I said cheerily. I didn’t want anything he saw to get back to my mother. Not that he would say anything. He never did.

We walked for a long time without either of us saying a word. It wasn’t until we stepped out into the cold air that I finally opened my mouth. “Did you know Rafe?”

“No, not really.”

I wanted to ask more, but what would be the point? He was in the same position as me. A man he didn’t know had died. And yes, he was our family, but it didn’t feel that way. He was, for all intents and purposes, a stranger.

“So…Kate is a doctor. What do you do?”

He kept his gaze forward as we walked away from the building. “I train the guys around here.”

“What does that mean?”

“I make sure they’re in shape, that they’re prepared for anything.”

Prepared for anything. I wondered if he had trained Rafe, if Rafe would still be alive. But I didn’t dare say that.

“Are you sticking around here?” Hudson asked, surprising me. He never asked about my plans for the future or what that might look like.

“Um…I hadn’t really thought of it. Do you want me to leave?”

His eyes flicked to mine briefly. “You can stay or you can go. It doesn’t really matter.”

“Oh.” I didn’t mean for it to come out sounding so disappointed, but I hadn’t been expecting such a harsh answer.

“Isabelle, what I mean is that this is your life. Yes, I like having you here, but you have to do what makes you happy.”

“That’s a little difficult, considering my life was just fine on the island,” I snapped.

Shit, I hadn’t meant to say that. Now they were going to start with the inquiries again. My depressing mood this morning had made me more snappish, and that would only end badly for me.

“It’s a big change,” he said, continuing to walk. There was no deception in his voice. He was just acknowledging what I felt.

“It is. Everything is so different here. And…” I swallowed hard, wondering if I could actually admit this out loud. But it was Hudson, and he had been so understanding so far. “I miss him,” I whispered, hating that my eyes filled with tears.

I tried so hard to keep my feelings at bay, to not let anyone else know how hard it was for me to just pick up and move on. None of them understood a damn thing about this.

He stopped walking and turned to me, cocking his head to the side. “When you lose someone who’s been a part of your life for so long, it’s hard to pretend that everything is fine and just move on.”

“Yes,” I nodded, a smile gracing my lips.

“Before I came here, I was an assassin.”

I sucked in a breath at the admission. Hudson had never told me anything so personal before, so I waited with bated breath for him to continue. It was funny how it was the fact that he was talking that surprised me and not what he admitted. Maybe that was because of who Ebarardo was.

“I met Kate on a job working with Reed Security, and…she changed my life. If I wanted to be with her, I had to change who I was. But it’s not so easy to walk away from everything you know and start over.”

“How did you do it?” I asked, desperately needing any advice he could give.

“It wasn’t easy. It took many years for me to finally feel like I belonged. And then…” He swallowed hard, looking into the distance. “Kate was taken because of me. So…I retreated. I went back to what I knew. It was easier that way. Except, I didn’t have Kate, and this life I used to have was no longer appealing. I’m not sure when it happened, but all of this…it snuck up on me.”

“What snuck up on you?” I asked, confused.

“Life,” he said, finally looking at me again. “Kids, a wife, a family at Reed Security, a job that—This wasn’t what I had planned. In fact, I really thought I would be dead by now. But when I let myself be this person…it’s so much fucking better. But it took a long fucking time to realize that I deserved it.”

He deserved it because he was strong and capable. I was…nothing. When I left with Ebarardo, I had just graduated college. I couldn’t even remember what I had gone for at this point, or what any of my classes were. Everything was so distant in my memory. There was only Ebarardo, and he was gone now. I was nothing without him, and I didn’t deserve this amazing life that Hudson had built for himself.

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