Page 42 of Justice for Francesca

She shrugged. “It’s a comfort read. Mom owned every single one of Agatha Christie’s books, and we read them over and over.”

“I didn’t even know I had that one here. Tilly was still pretty housebound when we came here, so I brought some of Tabitha’s leftover books when I opened this place. Guess I should have paid more attention. Books on murder probably weren’t the best choices for her.”

“Actually, they probably weren’t a bad choice. You don’t escape bad stuff by shoving it in a drawer. You have to face it head-on. The longer you let it remain untouched, the harder it is to deal with later.”

The look on her face led to the sneaking suspicion she wasn’t talking just about Tilly. “Do you take your own advice?”

“No. Well, rarely. It’s always easier to tell others how to cope than it is to take your own advice.”

She surprised him when she unfolded her legs and put them in his lap. Automatically, his hands went to her feet and began massaging them again, along with her calves.

They passed a few minutes in silence before his hand took the book from her, marking her place in it by folding the corner over before closing it. She let out an indignant nonverbal at him and tried to rescue the folded page, but he just pushed her hands away. “The book will survive me folding the page.”

She pouted. “Sacrilege.”

“I need to know something. You avoided me all day yesterday, and then suddenly, you were here. Don’t get me wrong! I’m thrilled you’re here, but this is a complete one-eighty. There had to be a reason.”

Her face remained blank, but her eyes reflected her indecision on what to share. “Cruz and Calder gave me a severe kick in the ass yesterday. Made me rethink some choices I’ve made that have been extremely unhealthy and set me on a path to self-destruction. I realized that I knew that was the case. Maybe I even secretly wanted that. Now? Not so much.

“I’m exhausted from fighting everything in my life. My family. The inherent sexism of the police force. Feeling like I’m running by leaving the Blue Line and joining the FBI. Feeling like I’m running by moving all the way across the country to LA, then running again by transferring to Dallas. The nonstop hours of being undercover—no days off, no time between cases, notime to put down roots or make connections.” She paused, and her eyes took on a faraway look. “My own feelings of failure over my assignment at The Library. You.”

“Not sure I like being lumped in with a sex trafficker,” he admitted.

“You’re just the most recent piece of the world’s worst jigsaw puzzle.”

“You said you’re exhausted. Babe, you’re beyond exhausted. I don’t know what that term is, but you are it.”

He needed to hold her, but if he did that, he couldn’t see her face. What he had to say next required her to see his seriousness. “When I first met you at The Library, I knew you were different. You seemed friendly, but apart. I know why now. You tried to insert yourself, and to the average person, you did that well. But for someone like me who’s trained to spot when things don’t look right, or at the very least seem out of place, I knew there was something. I thought it was because you were new to the scene, which you were. I never imagined you were hiding behind a cover.

“Despite that separation—maybe because of it—I wanted to know more about you. Drawing you out was tough. Didn’t matter. I kept trying to chip away. I thought I was making inroads. You seemed to lower your guard a little around me.

“Do you have any clue how broken I was when you were taken? I was so relieved when you were returned, but then you didn’t wake up for days. I sat by your side, willing you to open your eyes so I could tell you what I’d been holding back. How I was falling for you.”

The walk to the closet was like walking through a long tunnel that just got longer and longer. At its end? A big block of metal. Would he open it this time?

“You weren’t there when I woke up. Why?”

“You started coming around, and I realized you’d use the case you were on to put a barrier between us. I thought it would be best if I let you go and find your way through to the other side without me pushing you with what I wanted from you. It wouldn’t have been fair.” His arms wound around her waist. “I knew. I knew what you were going to go through. Everyone tries to help, but it just ends up being confusing. You end up doing what others feel is best for you, but it’s not always the case.”

“You know?”

“Yes. I’ve been through my own trauma, so I do understand. I was being torn in a million different directions—my family, my friends, the military, the medical staff who treated my injuries, my therapist, and my girlfriend at the time. They meant well, but it made things worse.

“Knowing how I am, I knew I’d try to manage you. To fix things for you. I also knew you would resent that. You needed to find your own way, so I made the most difficult decision of my life, and I let you go. While it may have led you to believe I didn’t care or that I wasn’t interested, it was better for you in the long run, no matter how much it killed me to do it. Even if it meant you hated me, I wouldn’t change what I did.”

“I could never hate you. And you’re right. I needed to do it on my own. I’m way too independent. Besides that, I’ve had enough of controlling men in my life with my father and brothers.”

He wasn’t sure why, but he found himself opening up about his retirement from the Navy. “I loved working with the Raiders. Loved the adrenaline of deployments. Loved the challenge of the injuries and putting people back together. We lost very few men, which is surprising, but I’d like to think it was because my being there made a difference.

“Unfortunately, on my last deployment, our commanding officer, someone I trusted with my life, and so did the rest of the guys, gave us bad intel on purpose. He had gambling debts andallowed someone above him to manipulate him as a way to cover them. His argument was we had a perfect record. We’d gotten out of situations no one should have gotten out of. We’d come out of this one too. Guess we’d used up all of our good luck.

“His choice led us into an ambush, and there was no way that could have happened without someone tipping off the insurgents. It didn’t take us long to figure out who, but it tore my unit apart. Someone who should have had our best interests at heart betrayed us. We lost three men that day, and two of us were taken captive.”

Footsteps in the jungle. Fading calls for him. For Chaos. Diminishing gunfire. Pain. His head hurt so bad. His ears were still ringing. His eyes wouldn’t focus. Jarring pain when whoever had him by the arms failed to lift him over obstacles. Where the hell was he being dragged?

“When my team recovered us, we’d only been gone a few days, but it was more than enough to ruin me for a hundred lifetimes. It wasn’t even the treatment we received. The whole situation made me question my judgment of people. The signs were all there in the last couple of months that he wasn’t what he presented himself to be, but when you see someone day after day, the changes aren’t as obvious as when there are gaps between visits. He fooled us all badly.

“I finished out my three months doing admission physicals. I missed being out in the field, but I also knew I didn’t want to go back to being under someone’s command in the field, so I didn’t re-up. My trust was broken. If he could turn, any one of the men I called brothers could, so I chose retirement.

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