“You were placed on this earth to do good things and I truly believe that. You can make a difference, a dent in the repairing of our country. I know this will all work. It has to.”
“Okay,” Sin says again.
“I love you,” Amelia says in nothing but a whisper.
“Okay.” Sin steps out of the office, finding me, placing his arm around my back.
With each step we take, the silence and the open space ahead of us allow many of the thoughts from the past couple hours to seep into my fragile mind. I had amnesia, forcing me to forget about two years of my life. I was a test monkey as a side effect of Mom trying to save my life. Mom is dead. Mom had a love child with Jackson Crownwell. So many explanations and so little clarity. I have every answer I’ve wanted and now I wish I knew nothing. The worst part of this is that Mom is dead—the one person I stayed alive for those years in the shed. I had hopes of surviving that horror just so I could reunite with her again some day. What am I surviving for now? Me? That should be the right answer, but it’s not the truth.
Sin’s hand finds mine and interlaces his fingers between mine, squeezing tightly, telling me how he feels without saying a word. As if he heard my thoughts, his touch offers a reminder, a cause, an effect, a reason for it all. He brings my hand up to his lips, pressing his mouth softly against my skin. I look up at him, needing to see the look in his eyes, needing to read his thoughts, too. When he looks down at me, I see what I need to see. I feel it in every part of my body. He does love me, and I do love him. It’s enough to get us through whatever this will be.
The scent of fresh bread awakens a different set of nerves in my body the further down this hall we get. The heavy aroma clenches its fist around my stomach and squeezes hard enough to make it ache.
“You two hungry?” Locke asks, turning to face us with a wry grin.
The response is written across Sin’s face just as it is mine. The response is telling him to shut up and take us to the food.
We enter a small eating room, filled only with metal tables. From the other direction, a patrol walks in with two styrofoam containers and places them down on a table. He pulls two bottles of soda out of his oversized jacket pockets, places them down on the table as well, and then walks back in the direction he came from. “Enjoy,” he says flatly before the door closes behind him.
