Chapter 22
Emily
I’m barely out of my car when the front door swings open and Luke steps out onto the large front porch. I knew coming here was a risk, but I needed to do something. Although he’s been back from…back for two days, he didn’t come into the office at all. Alec and Margaret both said he was working from home, but I knew the truth was he wanted to avoid me. I don’t blame him, not after what I did. But I can’t keep going like this. I can’t work day in and day out with someone who ignores me.
So here I am…in front of a large farm style house that is the exact opposite of what I would expect from Luke. The large porch wraps around the front of the two-story home, complete with a swing that on any other day I’d love to sit in and stare off in the distance for hours. It wasn’t easy finding this place, it was obvious that he didn’t want anyone knowing where he lived.
We’re literally in the middle of nowhere right now—I think the last house I saw was a few miles away. If anyone other than Luke was standing on the front porch staring me down I’d be worried, but even with as angry as he is at me, I’m not. I may have lied and deceived him, but I know he won’t hurt me…at least not physically.
“What are you doing here?” he calls out.
“You…you’ve been avoiding me.”
“And?”
“We need to talk.” I can only hope that I sound confident and that he doesn’t see me shaking from behind the car.
“No, we don’t.”
“Yes, we do.”
“How the fuck did you find me? My name isn’t associated with this place.”
“I dug,” I answer vaguely, slowly walking towards him. “I told you in the interview, I’m good at what I do. I find the things people want to hide, including you.”
“Just how long have you been checking up on me for?”
“Years.” On the way here I promised myself I would answer any questions he had, even if it meant admitting what I never told anyone else. “Almost from the first day.”
“Why?”
“Because…I needed to know what happened to you. I needed to know you were okay. I needed to…”
“When did you start again?”
“Start?”
“After you initially found me, when did you start looking again?”
“I never stopped. I followed your career in the Army, when you came back to the states, when you started Dark Water Security…”
“All these years you’ve been keeping tabs on me? Why the fuck not contact me? Why the fuck didn’t you just pick up a damn phone and call me? Why—”
“Because you didn’t want anything to do with me!”
“What you are talking about?” he takes a step back as if I had slapped him. “Where would you get the idea that I didn’t want anything to do with you? After… fuck, after everything?”
“My dad… he told me,” I glance around realizing that although there’s no one around, I don’t want to have this conversation on the porch. “Look, can I come in?”
He slowly opens the door and steps to the side, gesturing me to come in. As I walk into the large foyer, I vaguely hear him close and lock the door before setting the alarm. Perhaps he wasn’t as unaffected by everything as I originally thought he was. Silently he gestures for me to sit on the couch in the living room before he disappears for a few minutes. When he returns, he hands me a glass of wine before placing his beer on the coffee table that separates us.
“What did your dad tell you exactly?”
“He wouldn’t let me contact you, wouldn’t even tell me your last name.” I’ll never forget the sad look in my dad’s eyes when I would ask him about Luke. “That’s when I first started trying to find you. Apparently my therapist had told him that seeing you again could trigger…it could bring everything back for me. She thought it was best that we… deal with our issues separate.”
“Mine said the same thing,” he surprises me by saying.
“What she didn’t understand was that no one else knew what it was like. You were the only person who could understand, the only person who knew everything we had gone through. She would never understand, my dad… he would never get it, no matter how much time and space he tried to give me. Anytime I brought up your name, or what had happened, he… he had a hard time dealing with what happened. He blamed himself—”
“For what? It wasn’t his fault.”
“He thought it was,” I take a drink of wine, barely registering its taste. “He blamed himself for having to work late that night. In his mind, if he had left work on time, he would have picked me up from my friend’s house instead…”
“It wasn’t his fault,” he argues.
“I know that and you know that, but he didn’t. It got to the point where it was better if I just never talked about it. I let him think that everything was fine, that I never thought about…what had happened, that I never thought about you.”
“Until he found out you were looking for me,” he connects the dots.
“I hadn’t quite gotten the hang of hiding my search history then, so yeah, he found out I was trying to find you. I broke down, I begged him to try to find out what had happened to you because I couldn’t find shit online. They kept our names out of everything, so I had no idea how to locate you. He promised he would reach out to the detective assigned to our case, who then put him in contact with your social worker. He said he was able to talk to you—”
“What? I never spoke to your father! The last time I did was when we were in the hospital, when you came to say goodbye.”
“I don’t know. I hate to think that he lied to me, but I also know how he beat himself up over what had happened, so maybe it was him trying to protect me. But he told me that you were doing okay, that you were in a good foster home and you were doing well in school. But he said that you told him that you didn’t think it was a good idea that we talked. That just talking to him was bringing it all back to you, that you had finally started moving on…”
“He couldn’t have been more wrong,” he growls. “I fucking bounced from foster home to foster before landing in a group home. I nearly failed out of high school; the only reason I didn’t was because the school took pity on me and gave me a diploma anyway. And trust me, I never fucking moved on.”
“What he said…at the time, it made sense. The last thing I wanted to do was hurt you, so I figured if you could find a way to move on, to move past everything that had happened, so could I. So, I threw myself into my school work, and finally, I found something that would keep the nightmares away. Turns out if you work until the point of pure exhaustion, and then go a little past there, you pretty much just collapse at the end of the day. You’re so tired that even the nightmares don’t wake you up at night.”
“Em,” my heart breaks hearing the nickname he had for me so long ago. But I don’t let it stop me, I came here to be honest with him.
“So yeah, after that I watched you from a distance. I…I still needed to know that you were okay, that you were…well, out there, I guess. It took digging, but eventually, I found out your last name; after that, it was pretty easy to monitor you. I didn’t…God, this sounds awful, but I didn’t go crazy looking for you. I didn’t pry into your phone calls, bank accounts, or anything like that. I just…I just needed to know that you were okay, especially when you were in the Army and then when they sent you—”
“You knew where I was stationed?”
“Turns out hacking into the DOJ system isn’t as complicated as it really should be.” I shrug off his surprise. “If something had happened to you over there, no one would have told me. I wouldn’t have known. That idea drove me crazy, prevented me from doing anything, so I hacked into their system and set up an alert whenever your name came up.”
“You could have called me at anytime,” he points out. “A phone call, an email, something. It’s been ten fucking years.”
“I know, and you’re right, I could have. But if it would have brought you back there, I couldn’t do it. I believed what my dad said, especially knowing that my therapist had been telling me the same thing for years.”
“What changed? Why did you decide to come out to Virginia? Did you go looking for Alec because of me?”
“No,” I answer quickly. “I didn’t…lie about how we met. It wasn’t until he started talking to me about what he did for a living that I looked into him and realized he was talking about the same company you owned.”
“That’s when you decided to come to Virginia.”
“Not right away, but yeah, it was what ultimately pushed me to come.” I look out the large window for a moment. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but my dad… he had just passed away and for the first time, I was alone. Truly and utterly alone. And then Alec was there, offering me a chance at something new. Something where every time I turned around I wasn’t reminded that my dad was gone. The icing on the cake… was you. It was a chance to see you, to be close to you again.”
“Why not fucking tell me who you were? You sat there, in that room with me, you could have told me then. We spent hours together, Emily. Hell, we fucking shared a hotel room for three days! You could have fucking told me so many times!”
“You’re right, I could have and I should have told you who I was.”
“But you didn’t; you lied to me instead.”
“I didn’t—”
“You fucking did!” he shouts and slams his bottle on the corner table. “You fucking lied to me! You sat next to me and never once said, by the way remember the worst time in your life? I was there. Those nightmares that still keep you up at night, all these years later? Yeah, those are my nightmares too. Hell, we even talked about how we both hate enclosed spaces so fucking much! You don’t think any of those times would have been good to clue me in on who the fuck you were?”
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” I admit so quietly that I don’t even know if he can hear me. “I wanted to see if…maybe you could see me for me, instead of the girl who was shared the worst memory of your life with you.”
“And then what? Some-ay you would pull the mask off and reveal yourself? Would that have been before or after I fell in love with you all over again?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t think—”
“That’s the fucking problem! No one ever fucking thinks! I’m just some pawn to you all, someone to play games with—”
“I didn’t mean to. That wasn’t my intention, Luke.”
“What the fuck was your intention?”
“I don’t know!” I scream back at him. “All I knew was I felt like, finally fate was intervening in my life. That maybe, just maybe, this was my one shot at something for me. I know it was fucking selfish, okay? I know I was only thinking of myself, but I needed to see you. I didn’t plan anything after the interview with you. I think I convinced myself I wasn’t going to get the job so there was no reason to plan how to tell you who I really was.”
“You had so many fucking chances after that to tell me who you were!”
“You’re right, Luke, I did. I should have told you. I wanted to tell you so many times.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you?”
“Because of this! Because I knew this is how you would react and I couldn’t stomach the idea of you hating me.”
“I don’t hate you.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I’m pissed as all hell at you, but I could never hate you, Emily. Not after… everything.”
“I’ll send Alec my resignation,” I announce after a few minutes of silence. Ultimately this is exactly what I knew would happen today, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. I pick up my now empty wine glass and head into the kitchen to put it in the sink.
“You’re quitting?” he finds me only moments later. I’m staring out the window at the forest behind the house, remembering the night we spent in a similar area.
“It seems it would be best,” I explain. “I’ll go and you can just forget this happened, go back to your life. I never wanted to hurt you—”
“You’re not quitting,” he says through gritted teeth. “You’re the best damn computer security expert we’ve ever had, and before you say anything, Alec feels the same way. We need you with us.”
“I won’t stay if seeing me reminds you of what happened.”
“I’m fucking reminded every damn day of what happened.” Before I can realize what’s happening, his hands are on my hips, turning me around so we’re facing each other. “Every time I close my eyes at night, every time I open them, every time I get dressed, every time I fucking do anything, I’m reminded of what happened. Tell me it’s not the same for you.”
“I—”
“You can’t. I’ve seen the way you search a room the moment you enter it, how you won’t sit with your back to a door, how you’re constantly looking over your shoulder. You’re reminded just as much as I am, every fucking day, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I admit.
“Did coming here change that?”
“No.”
I look up at him and for that brief moment we’re back there. It wasn’t often that we were able to see each other, but his brown eyes and long hair are forever burned in my memory. I’ll never forget the way he looked at me that final day from across the weight room. The way he mouthed I love you for the first time just before we both knew that things would forever be changed. That day could have ended very differently…
“Go,” he steps back. “I’ll see you Monday morning.”
“Luke—”
“Go…” he pauses. “I need…time to figure all of this out. You being here…fuck, I’ve wanted to see you for so fucking long, Emily, you have no idea. I’ve thought about what it would be like to see you again, to hold you again, to just fucking listen to you chatter about nothing for hours because you couldn’t stand the silence again. But, in all the times I pictured those moments, I never thought it would come with you deceiving your way to get to me.”
“For what it’s worth, Luke, I really am sorry. The last thing I ever wanted to do was hurt you; I really thought this was for the best.”
“I know you did.”
“I’ll see myself out.”
I manage to make it to the end of his driveway before allowing the tears to fall—a mile down the road, I pull over and just let them fall. Even though I’ve worked with Luke for the last few months, it still seems so hard to believe that the man I see day in and day out is the one who held me every night all those years ago. The memories of our time together come rushing back, hitting me like a freight train. It’s not the memories you think: not the darkness, the silence, the damp smell, the beatings, the…touching. No, it’s all the other memories: the first night he held me after a nightmare, the way he would kiss me before leaving for a fight, the way he tried to protect me from him, and most of all…the way he loved me for all those months.
When I’ve finally cried everything out, though still not sure exactly why I was crying to begin with, I head back to the hotel. I don’t know why Luke insisted I not quit when it’s obvious he struggles with knowing who I am. As hard as it would have been, I would have left Dark Water Security if he thought I should. I’d love to think that maybe one day things will be… different but I don’t see that happening.
Is it too much to hope to one day feels his arms around me again?