Page 73 of The Captive Missing

Angrily, Shane departed. The two Cambric guards followed in his wake.

After the door clicked shut, Jason got up from his chair and skirted the table. Nobody stopped him. He rushed towards her. Val could see him out of the corner of her eye.

With each step he took, panic ratcheted up inside her. He would know. If he touched her, Jason would know the truth. How she denied him a baby, but was soon going to have one with someone else. How her body responded to that someone else.

As soon as he neared, she shot to her feet and tried to move away. She shoved at the black chair, clutched at her clothes, ducked her head.

Her actions hit Jason like a ton of bricks. He stopped dead in his tracks. Arms going slack at his sides, his face drained of color. She could feel the unending hurt that rolled off of him.

“Easy.” She heard Agent Finn say. Glancing up, she saw him hold a steadying hand in Jason’s direction. “Go easy.”

Jason’s sharp intake of breath seemed magnified in the tight silence of the room. Still avoiding his eyes, Val stole glances of him in her peripheral vision. She could see him run his hands over his face once before taking a seat.

More than anything, she could feel him try to calm down. Call it instinct, or an old familiarity they had once shared. It hadn’t really been so long ago that she was his wife. When did she start to not feel that way anymore? Like she didn’t deserve him, or their son.

Her chest heaved at the thought of Jace. She couldn’t breathe. Her heart ached and twisted deep in her chest. Squeezing her eyes shut, she pushed him down. Way down inside her until he wasn’t hardly there at all. If she let herself miss him, then she’d spiral away. There’d be no coming back.

“This nurse is here to complete her examination from before,” Agent Finn was still talking. “You need to answer her questions honestly. We are no longer at Cambric. There are no cameras to record you or people listening to what you say. Everything here is confidential. Cambric will never find out about it. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” Val nodded.

The nurse brought her medical bag over and settled herself beside Val. She again took all the particulars, noting that Val had lost another five pounds. All the while, Jason sat directly behind her, a few chairs back. Val could feel his stare. It bored into the back of her head, making her in turns uncomfortable and sad.

Then the questions began again, but by the nurse this time.

“Have you been locked in a room by yourself for longer than twelve hours?”

“No.”

“Have any meals been withheld from you?”

“No.”

“Have you been forced into sexual relations with anyone?”

“No.”

“Can you explain why you continue to lose weight?”

Val hesitated, thinking over her answer carefully. She had to give them some sort of response, because no answer at all would trigger further digging by Finn. At the same time, she didn’t want to go into detail about her time with Charlie, not in front of Jason.

“I chose not to eat,” Val offered finally.

“Why would you do that?”

Again, Val paused. Her mind whirled, trying hard to come up with a satisfactory, yet vague, response. Jason twisted in his position behind her, she could hear him. The squeak of the chair. The brush of fabric against leather.

Glancing over her shoulder, she saw him motioning to Finn, who again held up a hand. Jason went silent. They must have some sort of agreement, she realized. But she let herself linger in her appraisal of him a beat too long. Those arctic eyes swept back to lock with hers, the desperation ran clear in them.

Quickly, she looked away and Agent Finn took over the questioning.

“Have you been locked in a room with another person for any length of time?”

Val sighed, wringing her hands. She had forgotten just how thorough and astute Agent Finn was. His questioning sessions had often gone on for hours during the height of their original case together. She maneuvered her chair back to face him and finally brought her eyes to stare levelly into his.

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Was the other person male?”

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