She hurriedly touched the mouse pad, lighting the screen. “Believe me, my brain feels less knotted than it has in a year.” In some parallel universe, a girl like her talking to a guy like him might add:because of you. She might even walk right up and kiss him. But not this girl, not in this universe. “It’s just good to have someone to talk to. Anyone at all. I should get started.”
“Glad to provide you with a warm body,” he said, deadpan.
He stood. She pictured him assessing her with a raised eyebrow, but pretended to be absorbed in techie things. The fire popped and crackled, releasing a fresh woodsy scent.
Anyone at all? Really, Samira?It was just as graceless as she’d handled their—what did you call it? A breakup? A separation? After only one night?
In her defense, she was out of practice at human interaction. Heck, she’d never been comfortable with it. She felt him watch her a minute longer, her throat drying. He was probably wondering how he’d got stranded with such an idiot.
“Right, that should take care of itself,” he said, stepping back. “Toss on a log every now and then, would you? I’ll see if I can catch us some dinner. Otherwise it’s going to be porridge—and I hate porridge.”
“That’s not very patriotic.”
“Thought we’d agreed not to do stereotypes.”
She laughed. She’d left out witty. A sexy, caring,wittysoldier-doctor. Who was hurting, deep down.
Yikes.
“Pull the curtains across the blinds and it’ll be safe enough to light these.” He grabbed a box of candles from the mantel, laid it on the table and left, scraping the door shut behind him. She took a smoky breath. Had he invented the fishing excuse to get some space? Or was she projecting her own escape mechanisms onto him?
She set the password cracker running. As the shell screen began scrolling with attempts, she browsed through Hyland’s files. The sounds of Jamie rattling around in the shed and dragging the boat abated, leaving a ticking clock, the crackling fire and her tapping. The rest of the world had tiptoed away, leaving the two of them alone on a tiny island. Safe. How weird was that—she felt safe, even as she was doing the riskiest hack of her life? Had to be the Jamie effect. Who could fail to feel safe in his company?
The files outside the vault seemed as banal as their titles suggested. Tess would probably find dozens of stories in them but without context they meant nothing to Samira. She did keyword searches for everything and everyone she could think of related to Denniston and the Los Angeles terror attacks, and came up blank.
After half an hour, a shiver up her spine reminded her to top up the fire—and set up the camera. Away from the glare of the screen her eyes struggled to compensate for the gloom. She wandered to the window and pulled up a blind. After a minute she could make out a small lawn but not the narrow road or the lake—loch—beyond. She pushed her knuckles into the center of her back. No crack, of course. Her back was one big dull ache. All that time sitting in cars and the train seemed to have compacted her vertebrae.
As she headed for the car with her camera the silence pressed around her, save an occasional lapping from the water and the swish of her boots on damp grass. The fog had an eerie, diffuse glow, perhaps lit by a moon far above. Was it a full moon? She couldn’t remember. A jetty disappeared into the loch but she couldn’t see the end of it, let alone make out Jamie.
He was still gone when she returned. She fell for the allure of a shower, though with the water pressure of a dripping tap, it just left her colder. As she hurriedly dressed in jeans and a shirt, footsteps crunched outside. She flinched, her heart jump-starting.Just Jamie.Through the kitchen window she watched him slap something onto an outdoor bench, his face ghostly, uplit by his phone. Deep lines etched between his eyes as he gutted the catch. After a minute he rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand and stared toward the loch, remaining still for a long time. A faraway look, though he couldn’t possibly see more than a few meters. He looked tired, haunted, older—not the Jamie she knew.
But which Jamie did she know?
He doesn’t want to be read, so stop trying to read him.She grabbed the candles and lit them in the fire, one by one. She planted three on the candelabra and three on a plate on the table.
The door opened and Jamie strode in, ducking under the frame, sweeping cold air ahead of him. “I have fish,mo ghràidh!”
“More what...?”
“Mo ghràidh.Gaelic for ‘my...’” He frowned, as if trying to remember the translation. “‘...friend.’ Another day here and I’ll be speaking fluent Gaelic. And I don’t speak Gaelic.” He locked the door, the bolt clunking home. “I used actual worms for bait, which is another law broken, on top of fishing without a license—seeing as you’re keeping count. In for a penny...” He crossed to the kitchen counter in a single stride and lowered a tray on it, laid with two pale pink fillets.
“Seeing as I can barely understand you now, I don’t know if it’ll make much difference,” she said.
“You have an indecipherable accent yourself sometimes, you know.”
“I do know. It’s all over the place—sometimes even my parents don’t understand me. Wait until I get drunk—you won’t understand a word. I’ll be speaking any combination of English, Amharic, Italian, Arabic, in accents that don’t even exist... Who knows—maybe I’ll pick up Gaelic while I’m here?”
“I’d like to see you drunk one day. We’d communicate in the secret language of drunk people.”
One day.Another reference to a future they wouldn’t have.
“I don’t remember the last time I was drunk,” she said. “Latif didn’t drink alcohol and I’ve been alone awhile. Getting drunk alone just sounds too sad.”
“Well, you’re not alone now,” he said, suddenly contrite, as if her isolation had been his fault. He produced a bottle of red wine from a little pantry, opened it, glugged it into a glass and handed it to her. “You know, I get that you didn’t want me to stay, in France, but I would happily have come and spent time with you, if you’d...”
If she’d kept her promise to keep him in the loop? “I know you would have. I’m just not sure that would have made things any easier. I’ve been a little...confused.”
“I was meaning platonically, but...”
