A single beat passed before Michal lowered his weapon.
Tanner’s relief was palpable.
In less than half an hour Tanner drove into the parking lot of a small dry-cleaning business. He looked from Michal in the front passenger seat to Ami in the back, her hand already rested on the door latch. “Fran will go in and bring him out.”
When Michal would have protested, Tanner reminded him, “We don’t need any more people than absolutely necessary to see you alive at this point.”
Seeing the reasonableness in his assertion, Michal allowed the woman to emerge from the SUV and go into the rundown shop.
Two minutes later she opened the rear passenger-side door and handed Ami a large bundle of squirming arms and legs.
Michal’s heart seized.
This was his son.
Her smile trembling on her lips, Ami pulled back the soft blanket and revealed the child’s expectant face. Michal’s breath evacuated his lungs in one blast.
This was his son. His every feature was just as Ami had described—a mirror image of his father.
“Michal.” Ami turned toward him and offered the child to him over the console between the seats. “Meet Nicholas, your son.”
Michal took the child in his arms, his heart swelling with equal parts pride and love. The child wiggled and squirmed, but did not pout up and cry. Awe paralyzed Michal’s ability to speak or to even think.
But words were not necessary.
He had all that he had ever wanted within his reach.
EPILOGUE
SIX MONTHS AFTERholding his son for the first time, Michal had settled his family in a small, quiet village in a country where terrorism was an unfamiliar term rather than an everyday affair. A curiously sheltered environment where time seemed to have stopped at a better place.
Ami pressed a kiss to the top of Nicholas’s head as he scrambled down from her lap to play with his father on the beach.
She laughed and clapped at their antics as they rolled and wrestled on the warm sand, the ocean lapping nearby.
Though months had passed, Michal knew that she still struggled with some aspects of the past she had not been able to fully recall. The steps that had been taken to erase her memory had left some parts irretrievable. But she was coping, one day at a time.
Tanner had been true to his word, as, of course, Ron had been. Not a single shred of evidence existed supporting Michal’s or Ami’s cases.
With new names and a low-profile life, there was no reason to ever suspect anyone would learn the truth.
Their son kept them busy by day and making love filled their nights. Michal could not be happier.
His life was at long last complete.
Ami watched the two men in her life frolic on the beach. She loved both of them more than any words she knew could convey. Still, she tried every day to get the message across in all that she said and did. She had learned firsthand that life was not to be taken for granted.
The past seemed a long ways off now. Though the nightmares still surfaced once in a while, for the most part she had accepted that she would never remember everything.
And as long as she had Michal and Nicholas, nothing else mattered.
Well, except for maybe one other thing.
When Nicholas had tired and his father had tucked him in for an afternoon nap, Ami knew it was time to tell her secret.
Michal hauled her up against him and pressed himself intimately to her. “Shall we get an early start?”
She heaved an exaggerated sigh and wrinkled her brow into a frown. “Really, Michal, you are scandalous.”
